TrashCanBossPro Blog — Routes by Trash Day

Stops per Day and Drive Time: Measuring a Bin Cleaning Route

Most bin cleaning owners know roughly how many stops they did today. Fewer know how many they could do, or where the rest of the day went. Two numbers explain most of it: stops per day and drive time between stops. Measure them for a few weeks and you will know which routes are working and which are just driving.

Why Measure at All

The customer view in "You're Stop 12": The Customer's Live View of Your Bin Cleaning Route shows customers how far away the crew is. These numbers do the same for you, at the level of the whole business. They tell you whether a route day has room for more customers, whether a second trailer is due and whether a neighborhood is worth the drive.

Every operation is different. Trailer setup, can sizes, how dirty the cans are and how far apart the stops are all change the numbers. So do not compare yourself to someone else's figures. Measure your own.

Stops per Day

Stops per day is the simplest measure: how many addresses did the trailer complete? The Scheduled List shows each day's stops by trailer, and completed jobs are marked when the tech taps Complete. Skipped stops show with their reason.

Track it by trailer and by route day for a month. You will see patterns. Tuesday in the dense subdivisions might run well above Thursday in the spread-out area. That is not the tech working harder on Tuesday. It is the route.

Count skips separately. A day with twenty completed and five skipped is a different problem from a day with twenty completed and none skipped. Skips point to timing and customer reminders. Low completed counts with no skips point to drive time.

Cans per Stop

Not every stop is the same size. A customer with one trash can is a quick wash. A customer with two trash, one recycling and one yard waste is four cans. Because each address shows its can counts, you can see how many cans are on each day's route, not just how many stops.

Cans per day is often a better measure of workload than stops per day. Two routes with the same number of stops can have very different can counts.

Drive Time Between Stops

Drive time is where routes are won or lost. The time spent at each stop is fairly steady. The time between stops changes a lot from neighborhood to neighborhood.

A simple way to estimate it: take the length of the workday, subtract the time spent cleaning (cans times a typical minutes-per-can for your setup) and subtract breaks and refills. What is left is mostly drive time. Do it for a dense day and a spread-out day and the difference will be obvious.

Crew GPS on the office map gives you a live view of the same thing. A trailer moving a few houses at a time is cleaning. A trailer crossing town is driving. The time clock in the tech app records when the crew started and ended, so the length of the workday is already captured.

Using the Numbers to Fix Routes

Once you have a few weeks of numbers, look for the worst route day and ask why.

• High drive time: the stops are spread out. Can some move to a day that passes closer? Can the route order be tightened by keeping each neighborhood together?
• High skips: the trailer is arriving before the truck or after the cans go in. Adjust the order or the start time, and check that customers have their reminders on.
• Low stops, low drive, low skips: the stops themselves are slow. Look at can location notes and gate access.

Small fixes add up. Saving five minutes of driving between ten pairs of stops is most of an hour, every week.

Setting Capacity

The numbers also tell you how full each route day can get. If a dense Tuesday regularly finishes early, it has room. That is where new sign-ups in Tuesday neighborhoods should go. If Thursday regularly runs late, it is full, and adding more Thursday customers means adding a trailer or a second route day. When to Add a Second Route Day to Your Bin Cleaning Business covers that decision.

Write your rough capacity per route day down somewhere the person taking sign-ups can see it. It turns "sure, we can fit you in" into an informed answer.

Keep It Simple

You do not need a spreadsheet of metrics. Stops completed, stops skipped, cans cleaned and a rough sense of drive time, checked once a month, are enough to run routes well. The goal is not a report. It is a better route next week.

The Short Version

Track stops per day, skips and cans per day by trailer and route day. Estimate drive time from the workday minus cleaning time. Fix the worst day first, and use the numbers to decide where new customers fit. For the full routing toolset, return to the bin cleaning route software page.