When planning and optimizing routes, the goal of any route planner and business owner is to make their routes as driver safe, cost-effective, and time-efficient as possible. To achieve all three of these goals, many businesses, including such industry giants as UPS and thousands of other companies, try to exclude left-hand turns from their routes (right-hand turns in the countries with left-hand traffic, i.e., United Kingdom, Japan, etc.). Even though this approach may increase the total distance and travel time of your planned routes on paper, routes that avoid left-hand turns can actually be more fuel-efficient, less accident-prone, and more suitable for special equipment or transportation of large cargo.
Save More Time and Cut Your Fuel Expenses
Many studies and experiments have proven that left-hand turns (right-hand turns in the left-hand traffic) burn more than just your patience, but also require more time to complete and waste more fuel. Regardless of the intersection type and whether the given intersection is controlled with a traffic light or not, vehicles that are turning left have to idle much longer since they are either waiting for the traffic light to give the right signal or waiting for the oncoming traffic lane to clear out. Thus, idling for even a couple of minutes at each intersection can add up to wasting hours of valuable time and burning through tons of fuel and gas money. For example, reportedly, UPS saves from 300$ to 400$ million a year in fuel, wages, and vehicle running costs, using 10 million gallons less fuel, emitting 20,000 tonnes less of CO2, and delivering 350,000 more packages every year. Of course, not many companies in the world can match the volume of work UPS performs, but excluding left-hand turns from your routes can significantly improve the bottom line of your particular business.
Increase Your Drivers’ Safety
In addition to being inefficient and less cost-effective, making left-hand turns (right-hand turns in the left-hand traffic) is also considered to be one of the most dangerous, if not the most dangerous, directional change a driver can make. According to the Analysis of Crossing Path Crashes, over 50% of crossing-path accidents happen when vehicles are making left-hand turns, but only 5.7% involve right-hand turns. This is due to the fact that when making a left-hand turn, the driver has to stop in an active traffic lane, make an arbitrary and momentary judgment about the oncoming vehicles’ speed and distance, and eventually drive through one or multiple oncoming traffic lanes. Thus, avoiding left-hand turns may not only make your drivers’ life easier but also make their routes much safer.
Route4Me’s Solution
With Route4Me’s powerful optimization engine, you can import hundreds of thousands of addresses and get the most optimal number of routes with the most efficient and cost-effective sequence of stops where all left-hand turns will be completely or almost completely avoided. Thus, you can effortlessly make your routes much safer for your drivers, while saving time and money.
