Errand Route Planner

Field guide: Errand Route Planner

Saturday errands are a textbook traveling-salesman problem — home, six stops, home — that almost everyone solves by habit instead of geometry, which is how the dry cleaner ends up twice-passed and the loop gains a few needless kilometers. Transportation researchers call doing it right 'trip chaining', and it's one of the few personal optimizations with measurable returns: chained loops cut cold starts, kilometers and an honest chunk of weekend time.

Add home as the first stop, list the errands (the GPS button grabs wherever you're standing), and optimize the round trip. Twelve minutes default per stop covers the park-shop-queue reality of most errands — bump it for the grocery anchor. One practical ordering note the math won't know: frozen groceries argue for the supermarket as the last stop, so drag-of-thought accordingly when reading the run sheet.

Field tips

• Put the grocery store last in practice regardless of the math — optimized ice cream is still melted ice cream.
• Batch errands to one weekly loop instead of daily singles; trip-chaining's whole win is shared cold starts and shared kilometers.
• Check opening hours against the ETA column — the optimal route to a closed post office is still a wasted leg.

Records are stored only in this browser (localStorage) — export regularly. This tool aids field documentation; it does not replace your agency's official inspection procedures or engineering judgment.