Planning deliveries around school hours

To plan deliveries around school hours, find which of your stops sit close to a school, measure the roads around them at drop-off and pick-up and at a quiet hour, and schedule those stops outside the school windows. A van that reaches a street next to a primary school at 08:20 can lose a quarter of an hour in parked cars and crossings; the same stop at 10:30 takes a few minutes. Treat the half hour either side of the school bell as a no-go window for those stops, unless the roads you measured say otherwise.

This piece is for delivery and logistics planners, field service and maintenance teams, wholesalers delivering to shops, and anyone who sends vans into residential streets. It covers why school windows differ from the usual rush hour, how to find the affected stops, how to read the road speeds, a made-up example, the mistakes, and an AI employee that flags the stops every morning.

Why school windows are their own problem

• They hit side streets. The commute jams main roads; the school run jams the small streets around the school, where your customers often are.
• They are short and sharp. Twenty to forty minutes, twice a day, on school days only.
• Parking disappears. Parents stop on both sides of the street, and a van has nowhere to unload.
• Safety comes first. Many cities restrict traffic outside schools at those times, and children crossing make a van driver slow down anyway.
• They vary. Start and finish times differ by country, by school and by day of the week, and stop in the holidays.

Find the stops near schools

Start with your stops, then count the schools around each one. Nearby places, set to each incoming place with counts, adds how many schools are within the distance you choose and the nearest one with its distance. Use the types Primary school, Secondary school and Kindergarten, and a distance of 300 m for streets you drive into.

Then measure the roads. Traffic Flow reads how the traffic moves on the roads around each stop at the moment it runs: the current and free-flow speed, the jam factor from 0 to 10, congestion as a percentage and the busiest road. Run it at 08:15, 10:30 and 15:15 on school days for two weeks, and you can see which stops really slow down at the bell and which do not. Traffic incidents adds closures and roadworks near each stop the same morning.

How to read it

1. Mark a stop as school-affected when a school is within 300 m and its roads at the bell are clearly slower than at 10:30, for example congestion above 40% on most school days.
2. Leave the others alone: a school nearby with free roads at the bell is not a problem.
3. Plan the affected stops before 07:45, between 09:15 and 14:30, or after 16:00, adjusted to the local school day.
4. Check again after holidays and at the start of each term, when times can change.

A made-up example in Paris

Invented figures for illustration. A laundry service collects from 40 small businesses across two Paris districts each morning. Its planner counts schools within 300 m of each stop and runs Traffic Flow at 08:15 and 10:30 on ten school days. Nine stops have a school within 300 m. At six of them congestion averages over 50% at 08:15 against under 20% at 10:30; at the other three the roads barely change. The planner moves those six stops into a later loop and keeps the three where they were. The made-up result: the morning round no longer runs late on school days, and the drivers stop reporting double-parked queues.

Mistakes to avoid

• Assuming every school is a problem. Some sit on wide roads with their own drop-off lane. Measure before you move a stop.
• Using one time for every country. School days start at different hours; some finish early on one weekday.
• Forgetting the holidays. The rule only applies on school days. Keep a calendar of terms in your plan.
• Expecting the route planner to know. Route planner orders stops by road distance and time from a start you pick; it does not change the order by time of day. You decide which stops go in the later loop.
• Reading speed as parking. A free-flowing street can still have nowhere to stop.

Let an AI employee flag the stops

1. Schedule: school days at 07:00, in the local time zone.
2. My data with today's stops.
3. Nearby places: each incoming place with counts, schools within 300 m.
4. Traffic incidents around each stop, closures and roadworks within 500 m.
5. Branch: stops with a school nearby go one way, the rest the other.
6. Route planner on each branch separately: the early loop without school stops, a later loop with them.
7. Email the two routes to dispatch, with the directions link for each stop.

A second, smaller flow can run Traffic Flow at the bell hours for two weeks whenever you add new stops, to check which of them really slow down. Each morning what lands is two ordered lists, the closures to avoid, and the stops moved because a school is close. The templates incidents near schools at drop-off time, road closures near my schools before the buses leave and merchandiser visit plan for the week use the same blocks.