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# How to Reduce HVAC Technician Drive Time
Drive time is the largest recoverable cost in most service operations and the easiest to ignore, because it never appears as a line on anything. Nobody invoices for it, nobody budgets for it, and it is absorbed into wages and fuel where it disappears.
So start by making it visible.
What it costs
Two components, and most contractors only think about one.
Paid time. A technician driving is a technician being paid at a burdened rate to not be in front of equipment.
Vehicle cost. Fuel, tyres, servicing, repairs, insurance and depreciation, per mile. This is the half that never shows on a timesheet, and it is usually higher than people assume.
Worked through on illustrative numbers — six technicians, four trips between jobs a day, 26 minutes and 11 miles a trip, 250 working days:
| Trips per year | 6,000 |
| Paid time per trip — $38/hr burdened | $16.47 |
| Vehicle cost per trip — $0.68/mile | $7.48 |
| Cost per trip | $23.95 |
| Annual cost | $143,680 |
| Miles between jobs per year | 66,000 |
That is an example on illustrative inputs, not a claim about your business. The structure is what transfers; the numbers are yours to supply.
Drive time cost calculator → Your technicians, your trips, your vehicle cost per mile.
The second number worth having is what proportion of the paid day reaches a customer at all:
Dispatch efficiency calculator → Splits the day into on-site, travel, admin and unaccounted.
The five changes that actually work
1. Cluster the day by geography
The cheapest change available, and the one with the largest effect. Give each technician a part of the map for the day rather than the whole map.
The trade is real: a customer in the east cannot be seen by whoever happens to be free if the free technician is in the west. What you get back is a day that does not cross the territory four times.
2. Assign from current position, not from the depot
"Who is nearest" means nearest to where they are now. A technician finishing a call four miles from the next job is worth more than an idle one twenty miles away — and a dispatch board that shows live position is what makes that visible.
3. Order the stops, not just the day
Two technicians can have the same four jobs and drive very different distances depending on sequence. Booking order is almost never the right order.
Here is the same technician's day from the demo, as booked and as reordered by proximity:
| As scheduled | Reordered | |
|---|---|---|
| Distance | 89.0 miles | 69.8 miles |
| Driving time | 2h 52m | 2h 16m |
| Saved | 19.2 miles, 36 minutes |
An example calculation on sample data. The model is straight-line distance across a fictional service area with a grid factor applied — no roads, no traffic — and the reordering is a nearest-neighbour heuristic, which is simple and not guaranteed optimal. It shows the mechanism, not your savings.
Try the comparison → Open Routes, pick a technician, apply the reordering.
4. Widen appointment windows where the customer will accept it
Narrow windows and tight routing pull against each other. A four-hour window gives dispatch room that a one-hour window does not.
The thing that actually reduces window complaints is not a narrower promise — it is the en-route text. A customer with a wide window and a message at 1:40 saying someone is twenty minutes out is better served than one with a tight window and silence.
5. Stop reflexively reshuffling for emergencies
An emergency does not always justify pulling your best technician across the territory. Sometimes the second-nearest qualified person, ten minutes later, costs the day far less. Emergency dispatch without the collateral damage →
What will not work
Buying routing software and changing nothing else. If assignments are still made by whoever answers the radio, optimisation has nothing to optimise.
Chasing a benchmark. There is no correct drive-time figure. A dense suburban territory and a county-wide rural one produce completely different numbers under identical dispatching. Compare against your own trend.
Squeezing technicians. Drive time is a routing and scheduling outcome, not an effort outcome. Treating it as a performance metric produces rushed driving and resentment, not shorter trips.
Measure before and after, honestly
The only trustworthy figure is your own.
- For one month, record the trips between jobs per technician per day, and the minutes and miles of each.
- Work out your average trip, and run it through the calculator.
- Change one thing — cluster by area is the usual first move.
- Measure the same month next year, or the same four weeks after the change.
Anyone quoting you a guaranteed percentage without having seen your territory is quoting a number they read somewhere.
Related
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