Trip Planning "Coefficients?"

I also use a Garmin GPS. My moving average is 35.7 MPH. Like many have posted prior, I use the rough guestament that I can do 550 miles in 10 hours assuming not breaking down (knock on wood), traffic, weather or what ever else might slow you down.

When I take a load and it's 700 miles from pick to drop, if I load at 08:00 I know it's going to be the next morning when I off load. The exception to my line of work is the oil rigs and most of the tool companies run 24/7/365.

As stated prior, I also do my best to leave myself as much time as possible available on the delivery end of the trip. I'd much rather get there early and take a nap or go get a meal as apposed to being late and having the drilling company pissed off and possibly loosing a customer.

 

I use MS Streets and Trips for getting into shippers and receivers mostly. After driving across this country two or three times you should have the basic knowledge of the freeway system down. Using MS S&T you change your routing and look for short cuts but I would not think anyone driving more than 3-6 months across country would need a GPS daily to do this job. Just my .02. Thats all I have left after paying taxes.

 

Good formula to use so your planning with plenty of time for margin of error. Round up in increments of 50 on your actual miles. divide by 50 mph. leaves plenty of time for traffic conditions to change.

 

This takes into account of the terrain and weather by predicting low mph if i was hypathetically in a governed 65 mph truck i could generally avg 600 miles per day wouldn't matter terrain. However winter weather, construction, accidents etc Do play into that 600 mile avg. Just my 2 cents worth.

 

Personally, I average my driving hours at 60 mph then will throw in the extras later. I'll add different amounts of time for fuel stops, taking into account which truck stop I'm actually going to. Some I know ahead of time will be 3 deep in the island. For the city driving times I'll tack on extra time depending where it is and always add another 30-60 minutes to that to get a nice buffer in time to work with.

I know it's not the simplest way to break it down but I'm rarely off with it so it works for me. When I am off, it's usually in favor of me as I prefer to overcompensate when it comes to time. In a 65 mph truck I rarely drop below 60 mph average but I keep the left door closed. Yesterday for example, I averaged 61.8 mph over 10 3/4 hours of driving.

 

600/10= 60mph 600/24=25 hourly average
576/10=57.6mph 576/24=24 hourly average
552/10=55.2 mph 552/24=23 hourly average
520/10=52 mph 520/24 21.6 hourly average
504/10=50 mph 504/24=21 hourly average

I have been told some major carriers will figure your loads at a 52 mph average when dispatching .I have also been told by same person that he can get there ahead of schedule every time and wishes they did not give him as much lead time. He does run hard and takes limited breaks .

Personally I think from a mathematical standpoint 23 would be a safe attainable number that you can make up with the hour you were not planning on driving if you encounter problems.

call it 12.5 hours to your 70 . . 70/12.5 = 5.6 days *24*23=3091 miles per reset . .

5.5*24*22=2904 per reset .

 

I like your planning effort but I prefer to use the rolling average and then add the normal amount of breaks/sleep/meal times. The HOS and meal breaks are more like fixed amounts of time, while the "all inclusive average" is assuming a little bit of HOS rest time all through the day. I think your method has you over-estimating time required for short trips. Assume you wake up, pre-trip, and are dispatched in the first hour of your 14 hour day. The trip is 250 miles. Your "all inclusive average" will estimate you arriving much later than experience would suggest.

I prefer using the 50 mph rolling average for the driving distance and tacking on the fixed & predictable delays like HOS and meals. The 50 mph gives a little room for small unexpected delays and you can use it in your head quickly (2 hours for every hundred miles of travel). But don't give up on this. Track it over time and use it if it works. What matters is if it works, not if you or I already have an opinion about it.

 

I'll give you a perfect example of why your idea fails in the real world, and why planning requires road/rest times to calculated separately.

You wake up to find you've been offered an 1100 mile load that delivers the next night. Doing it your way, using 20 mph, this is a 55 hour load. You turn it down and earn top billing on www.truckerfail.com. Why?

Well, let's see: 1100 miles is two shifts of 550 miles easily accomplished in 11 driving hours, 22 total so far. a ten hour break takes us to 32, and 4 hours of incidentals (more than enough, unless you run across Muleskinner's Electric Lizard,) gives us 36 hours total time to delivery. So I jump on this load with both feet, wake up the morning after delivery refreshed and ready to roll hours before your method figured I could deliver. So what happened?

Your average mph changes throughout your duty periods. It's fairly constant your first shift, as you're steadily moving. Assuming it took 12 hours for your first 10 driving hour/ 550 mile shift, that's ~46 mph. When you take off 12 hours later, that number is ~23 mph. But over the course of your next driving shift, your trip average mph slowly climbs back up to ~30 mph. Yes, it's back down to 23 mph the next morning, but I've already delivered. You see, the method of using that one low mph average works great if you deliver early into a partial driving shift; but by the end of the shift it is hopelessly pessimistic.

Hope this cleared this up for you.

Carhauler trip planning is way simpler:

1. Are origin and destination on map?
2. Is the $$$/PITA ratio high enough?
3. work
4. sleep
5. repeat 3 and 4 as necessary