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UPS Using Software To Eliminate Left Turns
cybermage writes "The NY Times has a story about UPS using software to dramatically reduce the number of left turns their drivers take. With a fleet of vehicles their size, the time and money saved by pre-planning routes that try to eliminate left turns means big savings." Some CS major probably figured this out instead of traveling salesman.
Here in Minneapolis, we have lights on the onramps to the highways to control the flow of people getting on certain roads at certain times.
Aside from my thought of 'this just doesn't work, I have also wondered about how much time and gas is wasted for people to sit and wait for their time for the 'green light'.
One car per green. The wait can be from about 2 seconds between greens and 20 seconds (or more). I have seen cars waiting for several minutes, when the highways are very open. I can't figure it out.
Left!
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Last year, one of my coworkers told me the same story.
He also said he knew a place that was virtually unreachable unless you took a left turn. It was not uncommon to see a UPS truck circle around the place a few times before they arrived.
WWTTD?
I generally plan my routes to avoid left turns. I have since I first learned to drive. However, if I must make a left turn, I find making it at a stop light with a turn lane is much faster, safer and easier than making a left turn without a light on a busy street. Stop lights also save more time and energy than stop signs. Maybe UPS should consider that next.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Actually, originally, more people drove on the left than the right. Many countries switched later on, and saw an increase in accident rates due to the majority of drivers having a dominant right eye:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_on_the_left_or_right#Myths_and_miscellaneous_facts
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
After the .Com bubble burst left the IT market in shambles, us contractors were scrambling for work. One of the odd jobs I wound up with in that time frame was doing exactly what the "Can you hear me now? Good!" guy did. Only I had a car, multiple phones, and a lap top with some really cool software.
I drove virtually every road from NW Chicago, to Door County Wisconsin, over to LaCrosse, and down to Iowa. And it only took a handful of days to start looking for route optimizations. We didn't have software to do it for us, we had state maps, plotter maps, and the laptop maps with GPS. Eliminating Left turns in busy areas, specifically those with out turn signals was always a high priority.
I can imagine the problem would be even more significant for UPS drives because of the number of left turns they will have to make in uncontrolled intersections. Turning left on a 4-lane avenue with no traffic lights into driveways, frontage roads, parking lots, what ever, can be a PITA in a car, let alone a straight-truck. The amount of gas they can save from idling, and gunning it hard to clear traffic probably adds up to a significant amount over the length of the day.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I drove for UPS and will say I hope it works out. Any way to shave precious seconds off a delivery are welcomed.
However, having used the DIAD IV system, I can't see it working out too well. If you're not familiar with it, DIAD is the little brown LCD screen you sign whenyou get a package and has all the stops a driver makes in his day organized in an order that is suppose to be the easiest and quickest. The problem is very rarely is it done right. So you'll be driving on 4th, and the next stop will be on the same end of 3rd. The problem is 3rd is a one way and if you turn on it you'll be hitting oncoming traffic. So you either need to swing around the block (wasteful use of time) or deliver it later via a different route.
Fortunately nobody with half a brain relies on DIAD for their route info. A driver with enough experience will know their route and what stops to make when.
With that being said, it was easily the worst job I ever had. I ran all day and barely ate. In a 2-3 week period I lost 15 pounds.
In the northeastern states, roundabouts are quite common. In fact, in New Hampshire, I know of at least two places where two state routes (these two-lane roads would be considered "major" highways only in N.H.) have roundabouts as the "interchange"
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I'm a wierdo, but of course if I wasn't I wouldn't be on slashdot. Nerds aren't exactly "normal" now are we? At any rate, at three bucks per gallon I've been driving in such a manner to minimize my gas useage. It annoys my passengers, while I'm annoyed at the dimwits who race to the next red light, only to be sitting there making me stop at a green light.
I found I wasn't unique, there is actually a name for people like me - "hypermilers". The EPA estimate on my large car (I'm not even a radical hypermiler) is 35 mpg on th ehighway, I can get 36 if I do 50MPH (which REALLY pisses people off, even though I stay in the right lane).
Any way, left turns onto a highway do, indeed, use gas, particularly if there's heavy traffic. But at an intersection, particularly with a left turn arrow, it uses no more gas than a right turn. You have to use as much gas idling to wait for traffic turning right from a side street as you do waiting for traffic turning left on to a side street.
But the seconds of idling don't use much gas at all. What REALLY uses gas is stopping, period. Every time you touch your brake you convert the kinetic energy you spent gas obtaining to heat and throw it away. If you're stopped completely you must overcome inertia, which takes even more energy.
So when I take my foot off the gas when the light ahead turns red, coast to it, and am forced to stop behind your stupid ass at a green light because you zoomed around me racing to the red light, I'm blasting my horn, you rich damned dumbass. Waste your own damned gas but waste mine and I'm pissed.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
That only works if your city is a grid. The town that I grew up in was not laid out in a grid, and hence, if you took 3 rights, you may not end up doing a left turn. There was even one street that intersected with itself. If you go on that street and keep on turning right, you'll be stuck in an infinite loop.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
My first encounter with that had a lot of honking horns behind me, and my 'navigator' saying "why are they honking at you?"
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Any problem can be made unsolvable if there are enough meetings made to discuss it.
I remember using Arc/Info Version 4 in about 1990 and its routing software let you specify a 'turn impedance' at every node (junction), so that going from arc id 2 to arc id 4 would add a weight of 2.5, and going from arc id 2 to arc id 6 would add a weight of 5.6, or whatever. Each arc also has a weight for the length of time it takes to go along it, and then you just did your usual solve for minimum weight. We did this for ambulance travel times.
Nice to see Fedex have dragged themselves into the 90s.
Back in the early 80's, I-25 in Denver would literally come to a crawl and it would be true stop and go traffic. The reason is that at the top of the on-ramps would be stop lights. These would release a batch of cars (2 abreast), who would then FLOOD i-25. At the merge point, the I-25 cars literally had to stop to allow the mass of merging cars in. In 1986, they added those on-ramp lights, and it changed the flow of I-25. Basically, these were timed to the flow of traffic. As I-25 go heavier, then the red light got longer. But now, I-25 flows MUCH faster, fewer accidents, and almost certainly carries a GREAT deal more traffic.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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J Edgar Hoover (JEHoover's witness?) famously used to insist on not taking a left turn on journeys (apparently, when the G Men couldnt avoid it, they distracted him whilst the turns were made) J
Funny enough, this is close to the truth. In my last house if there was a Fedex package scheduled for Friday delivery, come about 3pm, guaranteed it would show up in the system as Address Unknown, even if the guy had been there the day before. Come Monday, they would try again and have no problems. We were pretty close to the end of the route and I think it was just a matter of being time to head out for early beers.
On the other hand, I've had the UPS guy drop off a package after 9pm during the Christmas season. Those guys were working until they were done. That's the reason I avoid shipping Fedex.
I know you're joking, but Brasilia was originally designed like that. The idea wasn't to eliminate the left wing (heh, heh...the city was also designed in a shape that resembles an airplane or bird from an aerial view, depending on who you ask), but to make traffic lights unnecessary. Didn't quite scale as the city grew, and there are traffic lights now, but the idea was awesome...
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