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.