17 September 2025
Postcode sectors that hide mileage on a tidy sheet
Two drops can share a sector and still sit twenty minutes apart once you leave the A-road. Planned mileage often follows the sector, not the lane.
Planning systems group work by postcode sector because retailers buy coverage that way. The van does not. A farm drop at the far end of a long sector can add eight miles that never appeared when the sheet was built from centroids.
In parts of Wales, Cumbria, and Argyll the sector is a poor proxy for time. PA and CA codes in particular punish a round that looks compact on a coloured map. Glenmore sits in PA20; we are not romantic about this, we are local to the problem.
Ask for planned mileage and actual odometer or telematics mileage for the same round. The gap is often empty running between a last-mile cluster and a single out-of-town store that was added to ‘fill the van’.
Charts that only show delay minutes will miss this. A round can hit every window and still be expensive. We draw mileage as a second chart with the same round numbers, so the expensive tidy round is visible.
When a retailer insists on a remote store remaining on a van already full of high-street work, the comparison is not ‘driver efficiency’. It is whether that store belongs on a separate early run. The sheet will not suggest that split unless someone draws the miles.