Collection from base

Hello mtvan members, what would you recommend the milage radius from your base for collecting loads to deliver, ive set mine as 50 miles at the moment but thats about an hours drive. Would you think this is a realistic milage setting. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

If you operated from where I do Darren you could stick another '0' on the end, but realistically I have to run at least 70 mile to do any good.

50 miles is probably good for you as it will ensure that you always get to see all the alerts within your catchment area and a little bit beyond.

However, even at 50 miles you have to think carefully about each job. You need to visualise it on a map as an isosceles triangle.

As long as the paid miles make up the longest side of the triangle then it is probably worth doing.

Scott.

Also take into consideration if you travel 50 dead miles to do a 100 mile job away from home your round trip is 300

But of course if the 50 dead miles are anywhere in the line between pick up and drop, they're not really dead at all, as your journey home is 50 miles shorter.

Schofields couriers said:

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Also take into consideration if you travel 50 dead miles to do a 100 mile job away from home your round trip is 300

Hence the isosceles triangle. :-)

Thats what i try to do thats why i said away from home. But another thing to watch out for i drove out 37mile this morning to pick up a job they put down as a transit but needed xlwb thats where the fun begins over cancelation charge but lucky enough i got another job of them

On most jobs, the shortest side of the triangle should be from your location to the pickup.

The second shortest should be the return journey from the drop off back to your location.

The longest side of the triangle should be loaded miles.

There are only two exceptions to this that I have come across so far:

1: Small local jobs where the actual carriage amounts to less than 33 miles (I've had as low as 6 miles). In this instance we look at the job estimate the time and fuel and quote accordingly.

2: The very rare instance when a local firm who uses you regularly calls you to do a collection rather far away in order to deliver even further away.

We had this just last week when we were asked to do a collection in Coventry and deliver to Kent (we are based in Manchester).

We charged from our door, to collection, to drop off.

There are no hard and fast rules. You just need to decide what works for you. However for the majority of jobs the isosceles triangle works.

Scott.

Thanks for the input guys

Price each job individually and use round trip pricing as your basis. Base to Collection to Delivery and back to Base. ( at about 50% of what you want your pont to point price to be).

Always fair because every mile gets accounted for...

Does anyone ever analyse the mileage traveled to miles paid?

I always look on a daily basis, never make note (I should I know) but today's was 84% of my miles today were fully paid miles (not a backload rate)

MK Bikes said:

Does anyone ever analyse the mileage traveled to miles paid?

I always look on a daily basis, never make note (I should I know) but today's was 84% of my miles today were fully paid miles (not a backload rate)

Not directly as yet, but I kind of keep an eye on that when pricing a job. I'm assuming you mean 84% of your total miles, not your loaded miles?

As far as the OP's question...

I would say that distance to collection is completely irrelevant, it is more important to minimise the amount of total lost/dead miles in any one job. As Scott (Peter Riley) said, keeping to an isosceles triangle (see linked pic) will help when visualizing a route, but it doesn't have to be collection that is closest to base, it could be delivery point, or as Tim said it could be none of the above and that the route passes close by to base (Scalene Triangle, which I think works better than Isosceles as one side is longer than the other two). The issue then becomes time of collection and/or delivery.

In the isosceles diagram, if A is collection point, B is base and C is delivery your total travelled miles and total loaded miles are the same as if C is collection, B is base and A is delivery. Your problem occurs if A is base and the others are collection and delivery as you have more dead miles to travel. Doesn't mean you shouldn't do the job, you just need to price accordingly and realise that others closer to collection or delivery could be more competitive on price. If no other courier is closer or more competitive, or if your service is far superior you may well get the job anyway. One company I've subbed to have given me a few jobs where the dead miles was twice as much as the loaded miles, so I charged accordingly, they paid and they still come back for more!

Isosceles....

WW

Scalene... Where you ideally want c to be the loaded/charged miles

WW

Nicely put Mr Garner... I have a feeling some may read twice or 3 times, and even more may start to glaze over, but you make the point well

Scott Garner said:

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Not directly as yet, but I kind of keep an eye on that when pricing a job. I'm assuming you mean 84% of your total miles, not your loaded miles?

Of total miles, including return miles most sameday would be 50% or less if you have some dead miles to collection

Scott Garner said:

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Not directly as yet, but I kind of keep an eye on that when pricing a job. I'm assuming you mean 84% of your total miles, not your loaded miles?

MK Bikes said:

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Of total miles, including return miles most sameday would be 50% or less if you have some dead miles to collection

As a percentage 'twas a good day then, so long as it was not ten miles total!

Speed Couriers (Stansted) said:

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Nicely put Mr Garner... I have a feeling some may read twice or 3 times, and even more may start to glaze over, but you make the point well

Muchas gracias, I'm only 75% as daft as I look! I did try to keep the waffle to a minimum without missing anything out.

Scott Garner said:

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MK Bikes said:

Does anyone ever analyse the mileage traveled to miles paid?

I always look on a daily basis, never make note (I should I know) but today's was 84% of my miles today were fully paid miles (not a backload rate)

Not directly as yet, but I kind of keep an eye on that when pricing a job. I'm assuming you mean 84% of your total miles, not your loaded miles?

As far as the OP's question...

I would say that distance to collection is completely irrelevant, it is more important to minimise the amount of total lost/dead miles in any one job. As Scott (Peter Riley) said, keeping to an isosceles triangle (see linked pic) will help when visualizing a route, but it doesn't have to be collection that is closest to base, it could be delivery point, or as Tim said it could be none of the above and that the route passes close by to base (Scalene Triangle, which I think works better than Isosceles as one side is longer than the other two). The issue then becomes time of collection and/or delivery.

In the isosceles diagram, if A is collection point, B is base and C is delivery your total travelled miles and total loaded miles are the same as if C is collection, B is base and A is delivery. Your problem occurs if A is base and the others are collection and delivery as you have more dead miles to travel. Doesn't mean you shouldn't do the job, you just need to price accordingly and realise that others closer to collection or delivery could be more competitive on price. If no other courier is closer or more competitive, or if your service is far superior you may well get the job anyway. One company I've subbed to have given me a few jobs where the dead miles was twice as much as the loaded miles, so I charged accordingly, they paid and they still come back for more!

Isosceles....

WW

Scalene... Where you ideally want c to be the loaded/charged miles

WW

Totally correct! I only kept my example exclusively to the isosceles triangle as these are the kind of jobs which will make up 95%+ of the majority of the journeys which a courier will be offered.

Also, as I mentioned! If the job doesn't fit this description then you have to think about it and charge accordingly.

Scott.

Who'd have thought all those years of geometry and algebra would eventually become a useful tool for the Courier

I've always wondered what possible use it all had in day to day life

Now I know

Where do logarithms fit it then? I still haven't found a use for them.

According to Dr Tom of the Maths forum:-

"Any time you need to convert multiplications to additions, they can be useful.
For example, if you get a loan at a bank that has continuous interest (they all do), and youn eed to calculate how long it will take to pay it back, you need to use logarithms.

If you are a scientist studying anything with exponential growth, like biologists studying populations, physicists studying nuclear reactions, chemists studying chain reactions; or a banker calculating how long it will take for investments to reach certain levels at given interest rates, you need to use logarithms.

If you are a physiologist looking at how the eye reacts to light or the ear to sound, both are so-called "logarithmic devices", i.e., if you double the light or the sound, the reaction of the eye or ear is to signal not a double strength, but rather an increase by a fixed step. That way you can see light or hear sound in a huge range without having a complex signaling system.

Electrical engineers use logarithms to work on signal decay.
Similarly with communications experts.
Computer scientists looking at how fast programs run with respect to the size of the inputs use logarithms often.
For example, most good sorting programs take time proportional to n*log(n) to sort a list of n items."

And earthquakes AND hurricanes are measured using logarithms

So there you have it

Cool, now no one will hate me for mentioning isosceles triangles!

Scott.

:-)

Is there an anti-triangle brigade out there then Scott?

Thats worrying if true

Thats the trouble with times of hardship, one only has to look back to Germany, January 1933 to see where extreme views can lead.