PortaPottyBossPro Blog — Routes & Dispatch

City Porta Potty Routes: Traffic, Tight Sites and Parking the Pump Truck

City routes are the opposite of rural ones. The stops are close together, sometimes three on one block, but the truck can spend more time stuck at a light or hunting for a place to park than it does between stops on a county road. The previous article, Rural Porta Potty Routes: Long Miles, Few Stops and How to Make Them Pay, covered long loops with few stops. This one covers short hops with lots of friction.

The City Problem

In town, distance is not the main cost. Time is. A route that looks tight on a map can run late because of rush hour, school zones, a street closed for a parade, or a construction site where the only way in is through a gate shared with three concrete trucks.

That changes how you build city routes. Order matters as much as grouping, and time of day matters as much as distance.

Group by Neighborhood, Then by Time

Start the way you would with any route: open the Waiting List map and group stops into areas. In town, the areas are smaller, maybe a neighborhood, a business district or a stretch of a single road with a lot of new construction.

Then think about time. Downtown sites are easiest early, before traffic and before the lots fill. Schools are a no-go during drop-off and pickup. Retail lots and gyms want service before they open. Residential remodels are often easiest mid-morning, after commuters leave. Use auto-routing to get a sensible order, then drag the stops with time windows into place. When to Override Auto-Routing: Hand-Tuning a Porta Potty Route Order has more on hand-tuning around time windows.

Parking the Pump Truck

A pump truck needs to get within hose reach of the unit. In the city, that is often the hardest part of the stop. Put parking notes in the placement notes on the job: park in the alley behind the building, use the north driveway, the gate code, or the name of the person who can move the dumpster that blocks the units.

Those notes show under the address on the driver's phone, so the driver reads them before pulling up instead of circling the block. The same notes help any fill-in driver who has never been to the site.

Tight Job Sites

City construction sites are crowded. Units get moved by other trades. A crane swings over the spot where the units were. A new fence goes up between the street and the toilets. When a driver finds units moved, they can take photos and add notes from the driver app, and the next driver benefits from it.

If a site's units are not reachable, the driver can Skip the stop. The office sees it, calls the site contact, and gets it back on a route. A skipped stop that is visible is far better than one that is quietly missed.

Keep Customers Ahead of the Truck

City customers often need to do something before the truck arrives: move a car, open a gate, warn security. The driver app sends an automatic on-the-way text and an arrived text. Customers can set their own alerts, including a text when they're next.

In the customer app, the customer sees the route on a live map and their place in it, like You're stop 12 of 20 — the crew is 5 stops away. That is enough warning for a building manager to go down and open a door.

Live GPS for City Calls

City dispatch gets a lot of same-day calls. A unit was knocked over. An event in a park needs an extra unit. A restaurant renovation needs a hand wash station today. With crew GPS showing on the office map, the dispatcher sees which truck is a few blocks away right now, not which truck is supposed to be nearby according to the morning plan. Live Crew GPS on the Office Map: Dispatching Porta Potty Trucks You Can See goes into how dispatchers use that view.

Measure City Routes Differently

City routes rack up stops but not miles. Track stops per hour on the clock rather than stops per mile. If a city route has fewer miles than any other route but still finishes last, the delay is at the stops, not between them. That usually points to parking, access or site problems that better notes can fix.

It also helps to compare the same route on different days of the week. A downtown route that runs smoothly on Tuesday and drags on Friday might be fighting weekend traffic or delivery trucks at the same buildings. Moving that route a day earlier can save more time than any reshuffling of the order.

Bring It Together

Dense routes reward good notes and good order more than any other kind of route. Get the time windows and parking right, keep customers ahead of the truck, and use the office map for the calls that come in during the day. For the full picture of routing and dispatch, see PortaPottyBossPro portable toilet route software.