How drivers' hours shape your delivery window
Why a long delivery is not distance divided by speed. How a driver's remaining hours, the 45-minute break and your collection time shape the window we quote you.
When you ring for an urgent courier the question is how fast it can get there. Distance and traffic are the obvious parts of the answer. On a long run there is a third part, and it is the one that catches people out: how much driving and working time the driver has left before the law makes them stop.
You should not have to think about any of that to get a quote. Working out which rules apply to the vehicle and the journey is our job, and so is building the window around them. Knowing it exists is still useful though, because it explains why some of our ETAs look the way they do, and why the same two postcodes can be a different job at 9am and at 4pm.
A long run is not distance divided by speed
Where the assimilated drivers' hours rules apply, a driver has to take a break of at least 45 minutes after no more than four and a half hours of driving. So a job the route planner calls four hours fifty is not four hours fifty from door to door. It is four and a half hours of driving, then the break, then the rest of the distance.
Which set of rules applies depends on the vehicle, its weight and the journey. The detail sits with the DVSA guidance rather than with us to interpret on your behalf. What matters at your end is that we have worked it out before we give you a time.
The closest driver is not always the right one
For an urgent job it looks obvious to send whoever is nearest. Sometimes that is right.
Picture one driver ten minutes from your door with a long run already behind them that morning, and another half an hour away with most of their day still in front of them. On a two hundred mile delivery the second one finishes the job and the first one does not.
So when we allocate, where the vehicle is sitting is one input among several. The hours the driver has left, the distance, the deadline, how long your collection is likely to take and what the roads are doing all come into it. Where the same movements repeat every week, planning, routing and sorting means that thinking is done in advance rather than at eight in the morning.
Why a late booking narrows the options
Our same-day courier bookings run until 4pm, and we would rather take a late call and tell you what is achievable than turn it away.
The later it gets, though, the fewer ways there are to resource a long job. Drivers are partway through their day by then. One has finished a run, another has spent an hour at a loading bay. None of that rules your delivery out. It changes who can take it, and how confident we can be about the arrival time. Where tomorrow morning does the job, next-day courier buys you a better plan and usually a better price.
A delayed collection costs more on a long run
Say the vehicle is with you at 11am for a five hour run and the goods are not ready until half twelve. The mileage has not changed. The driver has lost ninety minutes before the journey has even started.
That is the kind of delay that pushes a break into the wrong part of the afternoon, eats whatever margin was in the plan, and turns a comfortable goods-in deadline into a tight one. Having the pallets wrapped and the paperwork done when we arrive is the cheapest protection there is for your ETA.
Multi-drop is about the working day, not the mileage
A multi-drop round can be five hours of actual driving and still fill a day. The time goes on finding each unit, waiting at a gate, unloading, chasing a signature and crawling between stops in town traffic.
Which is why the order of the list decides the day rather than the total distance. A badly sequenced round crosses the same town three times and puts the last two drops at risk. We sort the load into delivery order before the vehicle leaves, built around any booked windows and the length of the working day.
Tell us the real deadline
There is a difference between "by five if you can" and "the warehouse shuts at five and will turn us away". The second one changes how we resource the job.
Same goes for a booked unloading slot, a site that closes at four, an engineer waiting on a part, or a line that stops without it. Give us the restriction up front and we work backwards from it. Find out after collection that the far end shuts earlier than anybody mentioned and there is very little left to work with.
What we need from you
Both addresses with a contact at each end. When the goods will really be ready, and when they have to arrive. Say if that arrival time is firm rather than preferred, because it changes how we resource the job. Dimensions, rough weight, and how many pallets or packages. How it is getting on and off the vehicle at each end, including any forklift. And anything about access we would not otherwise guess.
None of it has to be exact. It has to be honest, because the window we give you is built on it.
Why we quote the window we believe
Nobody wants to hear that a delivery will take longer than they hoped. An ETA that was never achievable is worse, because by then you have told somebody else about it.
If a job needs a break, leaving the break out of the estimate does not get your goods there any sooner. Same with loading time, and same with traffic. So our windows are built on the run we think will take place. That occasionally makes them a little longer and it makes them far more dependable, which for anyone holding a customer, an engineer or a production line is the part that counts.
Tell us what is moving, where it has to go and when it has to land. Get a quote or call 01277 549010.
