When I was learning to drive a standard growing up -- I used to plan my trips so I'd never have to stop on a hill. It was challenging, but doable. Now I read UPS has taken trip planning to a whole new level.
They have eliminated left turns from their delivery routes. Not only does it save time and fuel but is a whole lot safer.
From their website:
For 100 years, UPS employees have worked to find the most efficient solutions for delivering packages in a safe and timely manner. Careful route planning has been fundamental to the way UPS has always done business.
One of the ways UPS achieves efficiencies is through careful study of the methods used to deliver packages. Time studies led UPS to discover that avoiding left-hand turns would save time, conserve fuel, reduce emissions and reduce the potential for accidents. UPS managers (who for years planned routes by physically driving each one and plotting on maps) began experimenting with their routes to see if right hand turns would increase efficiency. It worked. For decades, UPS has designed routes in a series of loops with as few left-hand turns as possible.
Over the last few years, UPS has been rolling out some internally developed technology that automates many of the design principals that were manually performed in the past, among these is to minimize left-hand turns. Today, UPS managers use a combination of personal and historical experience coupled with specialized, sophisticated computer programs to design our delivery routes.
In 2007, UPS route planning technology, which minimizes left hand turns:
shaved nearly 30 million miles off already streamlined delivery routes;
saved 3 million gallons of gas; and
reduced emissions by 32,000 metric tons of CO2 - the equivalent of removing 5,300 passenger cars off the road for an entire year.
A great win-win-win. It's one of those things that at first sounds stupid (eliminate left turns? come on!) -- but when you really think about the simplicity of it -- it's awesome.
More interesting stuff about UPS on their site.
2 comments:
That is pretty cool. Because of this I would consider UPS first for courier service. Perhaps we should all plan our routes too.
As per an estimate, there are approximately 740 million cars on the planet today and the number is likely to almost double to 1.2 billion by 2020. An average car annually emits 4.5 tones of polluted gas. So you can imagine the environmental impact these cars and other vehicles will bring in terms of fuel emissions. Both petrol and diesel are the main contributing factor to pollute the atmosphere and bring climate change. The green house effect is a prominent example of climatic change.
http://crash456.blog.co.uk/2009/11/19/reducing-fuel-emission-7411650/
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