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Comment by nraynaud | Hacker News Reader

My thinking is that it could be more subtle.

(in the US) In very suburban streets in the middle of the day, nobody cares about turning left in an empty street. In more congested and wider streets it could get more delaying. But if the planning has been done by a software before the driver took the truck, the software might have avoided as many left turns as possible without telling the driver, and without having any need to ask the driver to micro-optimize themselves, they just follow the GPS (you probably can't do better), or the most sensical path ca't do better), or do a slight detour to get a snack (unforseeable).

Long story short it might be a software policy without being a driver policy, that would be enough to have a significant statistical result, I don't think drivers re-plan their shift.

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>software before the driver took the truck

The UPS route-planning system is called ORION.

>they just follow the GPS

I'd reckon that anyone on a bid route or other route that they are familiar with can do better than what ORION gives us. We aren't taking solely distance into account, that would be far too simple. We're considering other factors too, including hard time constraints like next day air commit times, regularly scheduled pickups, irregular pickups, business hours, and whether we can even physically access the packages [0, 1] that the system wants us to deliver.

>I don't think drivers re-plan their shift.

We most certainly do, we wouldn't finish the day if we blindly followed trace.

[0] https://youtu.be/fMeBkPd8ZJk

[1] https://youtu.be/Oi4DW04_D5o

My understanding from someone who contributed to the development of ORION is that drivers are encouraged to try to “beat” ORION’s route guidance and those improvements are incorporated into the route planner. Any truth to that?

Simply put, there's no way this is the case. There's a route that I and everyone else I've spoken to all run a certain way and improvements have not been incorporated into the route planning. On this particular route if you run the apartments when ORION wants you to then you'll arrive there after Amazon and FedEx have filled the parcel lockers with their delivery volume, and you'll spend an hour delivering your volume to each individual apartment door. On this route you need to deliver certain dense and volume-heavy areas before your pickups so that you'll have enough room to fit the pickups into the vehicle. I would love to see ORION automatically learn about when streets and such are added, removed, or otherwise changed, but that's a manual process. I can ask the dispatcher about what you're talking about, but as a driver I have seen no such behavior.

Unfortunate to hear, appreciate the reply.

great info, thank you. Sorry for the wrong guesses on your job.

Exactly, all you have to do is reorder the list of stops to make left turns less necessary. You don't need even tell the drivers about it.

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