Ask any delivery operation where its money actually goes and the honest answer is almost always the same: the last mile. Trucks leave the depot full and efficient, and then it all unravels at the end — one driver zig-zagging across a neighborhood, doubling back for a stop they rolled past twenty minutes earlier, idling outside an address that doesn’t open until noon. Last mile route optimization is the work of squeezing that final leg down to the least driving, the fewest miles, and the most stops actually served. I spent two decades building optimization models for exactly this kind of problem, and I eventually turned one of them into a free tool. Here’s why the last mile is so stubborn, and how a solver beats a map every single time.
Continue reading “Last Mile Route Optimization (Free Tool)”Chase Sapphire Reserve Authorized User Benefits
Chase Sapphire Reserve authorized user benefits come up a lot when someone wants to share their travel perks — or quietly hopes adding a family member will lift that person’s credit. Both are reasonable goals, but they pull in different directions, and the answer to “is it worth it” depends entirely on which one you’re chasing. I sell authorized user tradelines, so people bring me the credit version of this question all the time, and the honest answer is more interesting than the card’s marketing.
My Free Vehicle Routing Optimizer Just Got Smarter
I’ve been turning twenty years of Operations Research models out of dusty Excel files and onto the open web, one at a time. The vehicle routing one — the free vehicle routing optimizer that lives at routing.kindoflost.com — just got a round of upgrades that make it a lot less fussy to actually use. None of it changes the price (still free, still runs in your browser), but it removes most of the friction that used to make people bounce off it.
Amex Platinum Authorized User Benefits: Worth It?
People ask me this constantly: is it worth adding someone as an authorized user on an Amex Platinum? Usually they mean one of two very different things — will the authorized user get the lounges and the travel perks, or will it help that person’s credit. The Amex Platinum authorized user benefits that matter for travel are not the ones that matter for your credit score, and confusing the two is how people end up overpaying. I sell authorized user tradelines for a living, so I spend most of my time on the half of that question the points blogs skip — the credit half.
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Pickup and Delivery Route Optimization (Free Tool)
If you’ve ever tried to plan a pickup and delivery route by hand — grab a package here, drop it there, then double back across town for the next pickup — you’ve felt how fast it stops being a map problem and turns into a logic puzzle. Every delivery depends on a pickup happening first, every vehicle has a limit, and every stop has a window when it can actually happen. I spent two decades building optimization models for exactly this kind of problem, and I eventually turned one of them into a free tool anyone can use. Here’s what makes pickup and delivery routing genuinely hard, and how to stop solving it by guesswork.
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