Did you ever hear the story about UPS? They programmed their GPS (their google maps) to optimize right turns as much as possible when driving around and making deliveries. They found that when you optimize for right turns, you get a number of benefits: you reduce the wait time at the traffic light (if you think about it, a right turn is usually faster than a left turn at most intersections), which reduces the gas and emissions that the delivery trucks use, and another added benefit is that it is much safer — they found that their UPS trucks got into less accidents as a result for optimizing for right turns.
Since UPS delivers a lot of packages (a lot!) every single day, that means a whole lot of reduced gas, emissions and accidents which in turn increases their bottom line.
I found this small change in their driving really quite interesting — a simple change that gave UPS a lot of benefits and minimal downsides (sure, they may have to drive further in some cases to get to the delivery address and it isn’t like they don’t do left turns at all, just that they try to do more right turns) and I started thinking about different ways that I could incorporate that strategy into my life. Here are some of the things that I thought about:
Two paths to the same goal but one path is much better even if I don’t see the benefits…
