EskoBrummel
commented
3 years ago JE: I'm a little confused about the ask here. Does the current algorithm assign routes that end up being too long? E.g. a single volunteer is assigned too many stops?
SB: Yes and no. It's mostly that a route is too long (distance and/or time) compared to others. I guess some folks were feeling like the distribution of route length was not even. That said, another can of worms is that occasionally an individual driver may sign up but only have an hour to drive despite our request that drivers anticipate their shift taking up to two hours. Because we are chronically short on drivers we make exceptions and manually edit some routes to make them shorted (these are not cases people get upset about). We try not to tell volunteers that they can make requests for shorter routes, so individual route times should not be a parameter for every route, but if it's possible for the software to make a subset of routes under different parameters for time then that would be cool. Otherwise, we can just stick with making manual adjustments.
Balancing the burden on each route is ideal. Routes can be a pain both because of the number of stops (each take up 5 min once you get out of the car to do the delivery) and distance of stops both too and from. To illustrate: 5 stops on the same block can be a similar pain as two stops that are 15 min apart, but then there's the added effort of factoring in the additional time it takes for the volunteer to drive home. We don't need to bend over backward to make volunteering truly effortless, but balancing these various factors in the route creation and assignment is useful to prevent people from feeling shafted.