UPS Avoids Left Turns to Save Fuel, Reduce Emissions and Improve Safety
For 100 years, UPS employees have worked to find the most efficient solutions for delivering packages in a safe and timely manner. Careful route planning has been fundamental to the way UPS has always done business.
 One of the ways UPS achieves efficiencies is through careful study of the methods used to deliver packages. Time studies led UPS to discover that avoiding left-hand turns would save time, conserve fuel, reduce emissions and reduce the potential for accidents. UPS managers (who for years planned routes by physically driving each one and plotting on maps) began experimenting with their routes to see if right hand turns would increase efficiency. It worked. For decades, UPS has designed routes in a series of loops with as few left-hand turns as possible.
Over the last few years, UPS has been rolling out some internally developed technology that automates many of the design principals that were manually performed in the past, among these is to minimize left-hand turns. Today, UPS managers use a combination of personal and historical experience coupled with specialized, sophisticated computer programs to design our delivery routes.
In 2007, UPS route planning technology, which minimizes left hand turns:
- shaved nearly 30 million miles off already streamlined delivery routes;
- saved 3 million gallons of gas; and
- reduced emissions by 32,000 metric tons of CO2 - the equivalent of removing 5,300 passenger cars off the road for an entire year.
This is only one of the many ways UPS conserves resources throughout its business.
For additional information on UPS’s environmental responsibility, visit: sustainability.ups.com .
For every day driving tips from the pros at UPS, read UPS Experts Offer Tips for Better Gas Mileage.
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