EasyRoute: Agile Routing for Changing Service Needs

Waste and recycling routes rarely stay the same for long. New subdivisions add stops, staffing gaps take trucks off the road, disposal sites close or move, and service frequencies change with seasons, contracts or budgets. For municipal solid waste departments and private haulers, each change affects drive time, truck capacity, overtime and how residents see your service. Joe Baldwin, Senior Implementation Manager at Routeware, walks through the four most common route changes and shows how to handle each one in EasyRoute without rebuilding everything from scratch.

What You’ll See

• Adding new subdivisions: Bring new homes and service areas into existing routes and rebalance the workload so no single route ends up overloaded.
• Handling being a driver down: Spread a missing driver’s stops across the remaining routes so collection still finishes on schedule.
• Disposal site changes: Update the landfill, transfer station or MRF destinations and see how the new trips affect route timing and capacity.
• Service frequency changes: Change pickups between weekly, every-other-week or seasonal schedules and rebuild routes around the new service days.

Why It Matters

Most operations teams still plan route changes with spreadsheets, paper maps and calls to dispatch. That gets the day done, but routes often end up unbalanced, drivers work overtime and stops get missed. Confidence is the other problem. When you change a route by hand, it’s hard to know whether drivers can actually finish it. Route optimization lets you test a change before it reaches the street, so you can see drive time, stop counts and capacity up front. The result is fewer missed pickups, less overtime and routes your crews can trust, even when plans change at the last minute.

Who Should Watch

This session is built for route planners, solid waste managers, operations supervisors and dispatchers at cities, counties and private hauling companies who manage changing service areas and want to plan route changes faster and more accurately with EasyRoute.