How much revenue does drive time actually cost a service business?
Work it out in truck-hours. If a technician has a fixed number of paid hours and a meaningful share goes to driving, every reduction in drive time converts directly into billable capacity you already pay for. Cutting even thirty minutes per technician per day across a fleet compounds into additional calls per week without hiring anyone.
Do the arithmetic on your own numbers
Take one technician's paid day. Subtract shop time, drive time, and time waiting on parts or access. What remains is billable. Now assume you recover thirty minutes of drive per technician per day. Across a five-day week and a fleet of ten trucks, that is twenty-five truck-hours returned, which is roughly the capacity of another technician you are not paying for.
That is the entire argument for taking routing seriously, and it does not depend on any claim about your specific business. Substitute your own hours and fleet size and the shape holds.
Where the drive time actually comes from
- The first call of the day. A poorly placed first stop costs a long drive before anything is billable, and it happens every single day.
- Cross-territory jumps. One out-of-zone emergency inserted into a clustered day can cost two long drives, not one.
- Return trips. A callback or a parts run is entirely drive and entirely unbillable.
- Optimistic estimates. Boards built on drive times nobody has validated produce a day that runs late from the second stop onward.
Zoning beats routing software in most shops
Sophisticated route optimization matters less than a simple discipline: keep technicians in defined zones, cluster scheduled and maintenance work geographically, and treat cross-zone assignments as exceptions that require a reason. Most operations capture the large majority of the available gain from zoning alone.
Maintenance visits are the flexible inventory that makes this work. Because they are schedulable, they can be placed to fill geographic gaps rather than creating new ones, which is one of the underrated reasons a healthy membership base improves route density.
Measuring it without new hardware
Most field service platforms already record dispatched, on-site and completed timestamps. The interval between completing one job and arriving at the next is your drive time, and it is available historically without adding any tracking system. Comparing it against expected drive time exposes both routing problems and boards built on fiction.
Extracting and reporting that consistently is normal field service data integration. Reported by technician and by day of week in an operations dashboard, it usually points at one or two specific patterns rather than a general inefficiency.
Topics: routing · drive time · dispatch · utilization
Have a version of this question about your own business?
The useful answer usually depends on which systems you run and how they're connected. That's a conversation, not a blog post.