Why the cheapest road is rarely the shortest one

Ask a dispatcher why a particular route was chosen and you will usually get one of three answers. It is the shortest. It is the one we always run. Or: the driver knows that road. All three are reasonable. None of them is a cost.

This is not carelessness. It is the absence of an alternative. The tools available at the moment of dispatch — a map, a phone, a memory — can tell you distance and estimated time. They cannot tell you what the trip will cost, because they do not know what your trucks cost to run. So distance becomes a proxy for cost, and everyone gets on with the day.

The proxy is wrong often enough to matter. Here is a corridor we scored recently for a fleet running 32-tonne loads out of Bengaluru.

Route A is thirteen kilometres shorter and about forty per cent more expensive. It runs through three toll plazas and a stretch that reliably adds fifty minutes of crawling between four and seven in the evening. The distance advantage is real. It is also irrelevant.

The four currencies a fleet actually spends

A route consumes four things, and only one of them is distance.

1. Tolls

The most visible cost and the easiest to price, because FASTag produces an exact record per vehicle per plaza. It is also the one most often ignored at dispatch, on the reasoning that tolls are a fixed cost of doing business. They are not fixed — they are a function of the route, and on some corridors they are the single largest variable between two options.

Toll cost also interacts badly with vehicle class. A route that is cheap for a light commercial vehicle can be the expensive option for a multi-axle truck on the same day, because plaza rates scale differently than fuel does. A dispatcher who has internalised the right answer for one class will have the wrong answer for another.

2. Fuel burn at grade and load

Everyone tracks mileage. Very few track mileage per corridor, which is where the information actually lives.

A loaded 32-tonne vehicle climbing a sustained gradient burns dramatically more than the same vehicle on flat ground, and your fleet average conceals this completely. If you run a mix of hill and plain corridors, your average is a number that describes no route you actually operate. It is the mean of two distributions that should never have been added together.

The fix is not a better estimate. It is to stop estimating: you already have the data. Every trip your fleet has run on that corridor, at roughly that load, is a measurement. Twenty trips is enough to price the twenty-first far more accurately than any manufacturer figure will.

3. Idle hours

The most underpriced input in Indian fleet operations, and it is not close.

An hour of idling costs you diesel at idle burn, a driver’s time, and — the part almost nobody counts — the trip that vehicle could have been on instead. On a short-leg operation running twelve to sixteen trips a day, two hours lost at a plant gate is not two hours. It is two or three trips, which is a meaningful fraction of that vehicle’s daily contribution.

Idle time is also the input most sensitive to when you dispatch rather than where you route. The same road at eleven in the morning and six in the evening are, economically, different roads. Any costing that treats a corridor as having one number is missing the largest lever available.

4. Driver batta and time

A longer route in kilometres that is shorter in hours may be cheaper even after the extra diesel, because batta accrues against time rather than distance. Fleets that pay a night allowance find this reverses again after dark, which is why route C in the table above wins: it trades a small diesel penalty for a large reduction in both idle and elapsed hours.

Turning four numbers into one

Four inputs is three too many to weigh at dispatch. The point of a resistance score is to collapse them into a single figure between zero and one, so the comparison takes a second rather than a spreadsheet.

The weights we use as a starting point, for a general mixed fleet:

These are a starting point, not a law. A tanker fleet with route restrictions weights differently from a parcel operation with nineteen drops. A fleet whose corridors are mostly toll-free should push weight onto idle and fuel. The discipline that matters is not the specific numbers — it is that the weights are written down, applied consistently, and revised deliberately rather than drifting in someone’s head.

A score you cannot open is a rumour. Every committed route should keep the arithmetic that chose it.

The part that makes it defensible

Six weeks after a trip, a customer disputes a detour. Under the old arrangement the conversation is a contest of recollections, and the operator usually concedes because they cannot prove otherwise.

If the committed route kept its working — these were the five candidates, this was each one’s score, here is what it cost and why — the conversation is short and factual. This turns out to be worth more than the routing savings themselves for many operators, because it converts a category of write-off into a category of recoverable claim.

It also disciplines the routing itself. When a dispatcher knows the reasoning will be visible, the reasoning improves.

Where to start

You do not need a system to begin. Take your three busiest corridors and, for each, price the two or three routes you actually use across all four currencies. Use last quarter’s own mileage rather than a manufacturer figure. Use your real FASTag statements. Estimate idle honestly, which usually means higher than feels comfortable.

On most fleets, one of those corridors is being run the expensive way, and has been for years — not through negligence, but because distance was the only number anyone had. An afternoon with a spreadsheet will find it. What a system adds is that it finds the next one too, and the one after that, before the truck rolls rather than after.