How Far In Minutes, How Far In Miles?
I often post hints to keep you legal if you operate commercial vehicles under the so-called "short haul" exemptions from the standard FMCSA (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration) HOS (Hours Of Service) or RODS (Record Of Duty Status) (log book) requirements. Wow! How’s that for an acronym-loaded sentence … do you think we have enough rules about trucking in the US, yet?
Anyway, to keep "in bounds" with the mileage restrictions on the local driving issues you only need a simple radios map centered on the place your vehicles will be departing and returning to. I detailed how you can make one quite simply with Microsoft MapPoint. But MapPoint has another very interesting similar function. It allows you to draw a "Drive Time Zone" around any point on the map in virtually a one-click operations. Very, very handy for business planning.
Here’s an example for a pizza parlor located at the "House That Bart Built". (click on the image to expand, as usual) The owner has decided he can live with a 15 minute delivery time before the pies get too cold. It could take quite a bit of time to figure this out with city map and pencil but one click on his business address shows him the 15 travel time … and if this were a live version of MapPoint rather than just a screen shot, the order-take could plug in any address and instantly see if they were in or out of "the zone".
How about something a little more complex. A business owner is thinking of opening a branch in Pueblo, Colorado. As many of you know, a CDL (Commercial Drivers License) "standard" over the road operator can drive 11 hours in one duty day. So if the branch is put in Pueblo, what cities will be within a normal one driver duty day area of coverage. (Don’t forget, the truck will go a lot farther on Interstates in 11 hours than it will on secondary highways. This one seems real complex. But again
, with a proper planning tool, piece of cake. Just right click on the proposed Pueblo terminal location, tell MapPoint you want 11 hours of "drive time" (660 minutes) and your answer is on the screen in seconds.
A very nice tool is that Microsoft MapPoint, severely under-marketed by the boys in Redmond. MapPoint can do a lot more in the way of business planning as well … as always, let me know what you would like me to cover.
You Can Make Your Own Radius map...As always, I welcome comments, disagreement is encouraged, and you can also email me direct at:our secure, spam-free Contact Page or call me on 1-719-966-4295. If you liked this article, please subscribe to my RSS feed so you get all my news and views.
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