Commercial Vehicle Routing VS Regular Routing

Due to numerous state regulations, traffic restrictions, and physical road constraints, commercial routing requires a substantially different type of optimization than regular routing. Moreover, contrary to some common knowledge, trucks don’t necessarily need to be oversized or extremely heavy. Thus, for example, certain vehicles, such as those with more than 2 axles, hazmat restrictions, weight, width, height, bridge, and tunnel avoidance, as well as other Class 1- 8 vehicle restrictions, can be prohibited from using specific roads, tunnels, bridges, overpasses, etc. In addition to posing a serious danger to public and driver safety, driving commercial vehicles on public roads can also result in large fines and law violations. Taking into account all restrictions of commercial routing, using regular vehicle optimization for trucks can provide wildly inaccurate travel times and dangerous driving directions. In order to minimize risks, account for overweights, increase operational efficiency, and avoid fines for using prohibited roads, Route4Me allows you to plan and optimize routes specifically for commercial vehicles. Furthermore, by providing integrated route planning, optimization, dispatch, and navigation, Route4Me helps you to ensure a frictionless continuity from the moment you start planning a route to the moment the driver finishes navigating it.

To plan and optimize commercial routes, first, you need to build a fleet of commercial vehicles (learn how to create commercial vehicles). Next, you can either use default or create custom Vehicle Profiles with commercial parameters (learn how to create custom Vehicle Profiles). After that, you can assign commercial Vehicle Profiles to the vehicles in your fleet so that they can be used for commercial routing. Thus, when you assign a particular vehicle to a route, Route4Me takes into account all commercial parameters from this vehicle’s Vehicle Profile and applies them to the optimization in order to produce the most cost-effective routes on commercially approved roads. NOTE: All destinations on commercial routes must be located within 124 miles (200 km) of each other.

Examples of Commercial Routing vs Regular Routing

Since commercial routes must include only commercially approved roads, the distance and travel times of commercial routes, as a rule, are noticeably different than those of the routes for regular vehicles. Moreover, when using the same addresses, in most cases, commercial routes and regular routes will have different stop sequences. Taking into account all restrictions of commercial routing, using “consumer-grade” software for optimizing commercial routes can result in false and dangerous driving directions, as well as inaccurate drive times and distances. For example, the route optimized for a regular car most likely will be more dangerous or even illegal for a heavy-duty straight truck. Below you can find examples of the routes that have identical stops/locations and were first optimized for regular vehicles and then re-optimized for commercial vehicles.