2026-04-02

Reading empty miles without a colored chart

Take last Tuesday’s outbound from your busiest door. Mark the loaded miles between pickup and delivery. Then mark the miles from the previous delivery (or from the yard) to that pickup. That second number is the empty run that the sheet already contains; it is just not labeled.

Clusters of appointments in one industrial park can hide a second empty hop if the planner sequenced stops by customer name instead of by gate. We have sat at tables where two deliveries six minutes apart on the clock were forty minutes apart on the access road because the sheet ordered them alphabetically.

Layover choices show up as a night row with no freight. Sometimes that row is honest rest. Sometimes it is a driver parked because the next appointment was booked before hours-of-service would allow an arrival. The sheet will not scold you; it will only show a hotel town that does not match the next consignee.

During a walkthrough we pencil the empty segments in the margin and stop after five routes. Patterns repeat. If every Dallas-to-Pharr return deadheads through the same empty industrial park, the question is whether a backhaul appointment exists, not whether a chart would have been prettier.

Keep the marked sheets in the dispatch binder for a month. Clerks start spotting the same hops without a visitor in the room.