Who This Is For
Sixty drops, a tight schedule, and an address the satnav has never heard of
Delivery work turns navigation into a numbers game. One badly handled address does not cost a few minutes; it costs the position of every drop behind it. And the addresses that go wrong are rarely the ones on main roads. They are the unit at the back of a trading estate, the flat above a shop with the entrance round the side, the new-build whose postcode still points at the field it was built on.
Experienced couriers already know this. What separates the fast ones from the rest is not local knowledge, which takes years, but a set of habits that make an unfamiliar address behave like a familiar one. Almost all of that work happens before the van is anywhere near the destination.
A satnav is at its most confident and least reliable exactly where you need it most. It will announce arrival at a point on a road and stop, and that point may be the centre of a postcode covering several buildings, or the geometric middle of a large site with no relationship to the entrance.
The habit worth building is to look at the arrival point before you set off, not when you get there. Aerial imagery shows you where the loading bay is, which side of the dual carriageway the entrance sits on, whether the service road runs one way, and whether the yard has room to turn. Street-level imagery shows you the gate, the signage and the door number. Two minutes of that, done the evening before or at the start of the run, removes the circling that costs ten.
Where a customer has given a note — round the back, use the side gate, ring on arrival — treat it as better information than the map, because it usually is.
Signal drops in valleys, in multi-storey car parks, inside large industrial sites and in parts of the countryside that look entirely ordinary. A phone that has been navigating and scanning all morning goes flat by mid-afternoon. Neither is unusual, and neither has to end the drop.
Download or save the area for offline use before you need it. Keep a charger permanently in the vehicle rather than as something you remember on bad days. Write the address and a contact number somewhere that does not depend on a battery. Above all, keep a rough sense of where you are in relation to the main roads, so that a dead screen leaves you somewhere on a map you understand rather than nowhere at all.
A device failure and a navigation failure are two different things. The first is common and survivable. The second only happens when the device was doing all the navigating.
A delivery driver’s phone lost signal and he lost an hour, which shows what separates a satnav failure from a navigation failure.
Why professional drivers check satellite imagery and Street View before trusting the satnav’s final approach.
What UK truck drivers said about the tools and habits they rely on alongside a satnav.
Why the postcode only gets you so far, and how experienced drivers question the satnav rather than obey it.
Couriers, HGV drivers and caravan owners face journeys where following a satnav is no longer enough.