Drive time is the time a technician spends traveling from one location to the next during the workday, usually from the previous job (or the shop) to the next job's address.
How drive time is measured
Measured after the fact, drive time for one leg is:
Drive time = Arrival at next job − Departure from previous job − Any stop or wait in between
Estimated in advance, drive time is a prediction for a specific pair of addresses at a specific time of day. That last part matters. Twelve miles at 7:00 a.m. and the same twelve miles at 4:30 p.m. are different drives. A single stored distance between two addresses averages them into a number that is wrong at both ends of the day.
Drive time also depends on the starting point. A slot at 2:00 p.m. is not reached from the shop. It is reached from wherever the truck was at 1:00. Say the shop is ten minutes from a customer, but the 1:00 job is forty minutes away. The drive time that matters is forty.
Why it matters for scheduling
Drive time decides whether a promised slot can actually be kept. If it is not calculated when the slot is offered, one of three things absorbs it later: the technician runs late, the next customer waits, or the dispatcher pads the rest of the day.
CrewLink schedules around the drive, not the calendar. Drive time sits next to the job on the board instead of being buried inside it, and it is computed from the previous job, not from the shop. The longer explanation of why hidden drive time is so expensive is in Windshield time: what it actually costs.
A common mistake
Folding drive time into the job duration. If a 90-minute repair is booked as a two-hour block "to cover the drive," the schedule cannot tell you how much of the day was travel. It also means a job next door gets the same padding as a job across town.
Related terms
- Windshield time is all the drive time in a shift or week added together.
- Travel-feasible scheduling checks drive time before a slot is offered.
- Backtracking is drive time created by booking jobs in a bad order.
- Route optimization reorders jobs to reduce total drive time once they are booked.
Common questions
Is drive time paid time for technicians?
Travel between job sites during the workday is generally treated as work time, but rules differ by jurisdiction and by the commute question. For pay rules, check with an employment professional.
How do you estimate drive time between jobs?
Use a time-of-day estimate from a mapping source for the specific pair of addresses, starting from where the truck will be, not from the shop.
Should drive time be shown on the schedule?
Yes. When drive time is its own block next to each job, a dispatcher can see a bad day before it happens, and reports can separate travel from work.