PortaPottyBossPro Blog — Routes & Dispatch

Splitting Porta Potty Work Across Trucks Without Crossing Paths

One truck is simple. The driver goes everywhere. With two, three or ten trucks, the question becomes which truck goes where, and a bad split costs fuel every single day. If you just read When to Override Auto-Routing: Hand-Tuning a Porta Potty Route Order, you know how to tune one route. This article is about dividing the work between routes.

The Most Common Mistake

The most common mistake is splitting by customer instead of by area. Truck 1 has the construction accounts, truck 2 has the homeowners and events. On a map, that looks like two trucks driving across each other's paths all day. Each one drives past stops the other one will reach an hour later. Both drivers burn fuel and time on roads the other truck already covers, and neither route can take a same-day call without making the crossing worse.

Split by geography first. Each truck owns a part of your service area on a given day. A stop in that area goes on that truck. Job type comes second.

This sounds obvious, but customer-based splits are common because they grow naturally. The first driver took the first big contractor, the second driver got the event work, and nobody ever redrew the lines. The longer it runs that way, the harder it is to see how many miles it is costing, because each driver thinks their own route is normal. Looking at both routes on the same map, side by side, usually ends the debate in a minute.

Drawing the Lines

Open the Waiting List map and look at the spread of your recurring service. Draw your areas along natural boundaries: highways, rivers, county lines, the edge of town. A border along a highway is easy for everyone to remember. A border that runs down the middle of a subdivision is not.

Keep areas sized to what a truck can do in a day. If one area has twice the stops of another, either move the line or give that area two days. The board totals the stops and dollars per day, so you can see when one truck is carrying more than its share.

Service Trucks and Delivery Trucks

Many portable toilet companies run two kinds of trucks: pump trucks that service units, and trucks or trailers that deliver and pick up units. Those two kinds of work have different needs. A pump truck needs tank space and water. A delivery truck needs deck space and a way to load and unload units.

When you have both, split service by area across your pump trucks, and run deliveries and pickups as their own routes, also by area. Service Trucks vs Delivery Trucks: Routing Two Kinds of Portable Toilet Work goes into that split in detail.

Assigning Trucks on the Board

In PortaPottyBossPro, you select stops on the Waiting List and assign them to a truck and a day. On the Scheduled List, the dispatch board, you filter by truck to see one route at a time, set its order, and check its totals. Employees can be assigned to trucks, so each driver sees their own route on their phone in the driver app.

When a driver is out sick, move that truck's stops to another truck or another day on the board. The new driver's phone shows them in order.

Handling the Edges

Stops near a border are where routes go wrong. A good rule is to give each border stop to whichever truck passes closest to it that day, not whichever truck owns the area on paper. Check the edges each week, especially when new sites appear right on the line.

Live crew GPS on the office map helps here too. When a same-day request lands on the border, you can see which truck is closer right now. Live Crew GPS on the Office Map: Dispatching Porta Potty Trucks You Can See covers how to use the office map for those calls.

Balancing Work Over the Week

A truck that is overloaded on Monday and empty on Friday is not balanced, even if its weekly total looks fine. Look at each truck's days on the week strip. If Monday always runs late, move a few stops to a lighter day, especially sites that are flexible about which day they get serviced. Keep each truck's busiest day manageable, because that is the day a same-day call will break.

When to Rebalance

Rebalance when something changes: a big new contract, a season ending, a new truck or driver joining. Small, regular tweaks to the borders are easier on drivers than a full redraw every few months. Each time you move a border, tell the drivers on both sides, so nobody shows up at a stop that is no longer theirs.

For everything else that goes into routing and dispatching a fleet of portable toilet trucks, see PortaPottyBossPro portable toilet route software.