•Drive time between jobs (not including the morning yard-to- first-stop run): 1.5 to 2.5 hours •Idle and stage time (truck on, crew on clock, no work happen- ing): 45 minutes to 1.5 hours •Yard time, fueling, dump runs, supply pickups: 1 to 1.5 hours If you are running two crews and can claw back even one hour per crew per day of non-productive windshield and idle time, you are looking at roughly 500 billable hours per year across the operation. At a conservative blended bill rate, that is real money — money you are spending on diesel and wages without generating revenue. WHY “JUST PLAN BETTER ROUTES” DOESN’T SOLVE IT Some owners have tried to fix this with a better whiteboard, a better spread- sheet, or a smarter office manager. It works for a week. Then a removal in
Sometimes it’s a locked gate, other times it’s a car parked under the tree we’re supposed to remove—either way, it all contributes to customer‑caused idle time.
Edina turns into a half-day instead of a two-hour job because the homeowner did not mention the fence. A storm call comes in. The chipper breaks. The neat morning route is in the trash by 11
a.m., and the rest of the day is reactive.
The mistake is treating route planning as a planning problem. It is not. It is a real-time problem. Static routes built
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