How UPS Drivers Never Turn Left

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]United Parcel Service Inc. or UPS is the world's largest package delivery >> of 247 aircraft, UPS Airlines is one of the world's largest. Every single day, UPS delivers around 21 million packages.

[00:00:14]That's packages going to over 200 countries and territories, loaded into over 100,000 of those iconic brown trucks, driven by drivers who make anywhere from 120 to over 300 stops per shift. It is one of the largest logistical operations in human history.

[00:00:32]And yet, the thing about UPS that I find most interesting has nothing to do with the trucks or the planes or the sheer scale of its operations. It's the fact that their drivers almost never turn left.

[00:00:45]>> [music] >> I'm not joking. About 90% of the turns that a UPS delivery truck makes are right [music] turns. Now, this sounds like a weird corporate quirk, like one of those fun facts you'd read on a Snapple cap. But, I promise you that this is way more interesting than that.

[00:01:04]Because behind this one strange policy is a story about algorithms, obsessive optimization, and how the most important technology at one of the biggest companies in the world isn't the trucks or the planes. [music] It is a piece of software.

[00:01:24]Let me show you what I mean. Okay, so when you turn left at an intersection, especially in a big delivery truck, you have to wait for oncoming traffic to [music] clear. You're just sitting there, engine idling, burning fuel, killing time. And in a country where there are traffic lights at basically every major intersection, those seconds add up fast. And it's not just about time and fuel, it's about safety. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that left turns are involved in about 22% of intersection crashes compared to just over 1% for right turns. And of all collisions that happened while turning or crossing an intersection, over 60% involved left turns. Only about 3% involved right turns. So, left turns are slower, they waste fuel, and they are dramatically more dangerous. And when you're running over 100,000 routes per day across the entire country, these tiny efficiencies don't just add up, they compound into something enormous.

[00:02:25]>> [music] >> UPS figured this out in the 1970s, before they had any of the technology to prove it, which is kind of remarkable.

[00:02:35]Because on the surface, the idea sounds wrong, right? Avoiding left turns means driving a longer route, more miles, more time, more fuel. That's the obvious objection. But, UPS industrial engineers had a hunch that miles weren't the thing that mattered. What mattered was the waiting, the idling at intersections, the crashes, the seconds bleeding out every time a driver sat at a light watching traffic go by. Cut those out, they figured, and the actual [music] distance would more than pay for itself.

[00:03:04]So, they built something called the loop dispatch.

[00:03:09]The idea was very simple. Plot your deliveries in a right-turning loop.

[00:03:14]Start on one side of the street, loop around, come back on the other side.

[00:03:18]Avoid crossing oncoming traffic whenever you can. No GPS, no algorithm, just engineers with maps dividing delivery areas into loops and arranging streets into morning and afternoon groups.

[00:03:30]Almost all favoring right turns. And even without data to prove it, it worked. Drivers were faster, they used less fuel, they had fewer accidents.

[00:03:39]But, loop dispatch was just the first move. What UPS did next is where the story stops being a fun fact and starts being something else entirely. It becomes a 50-year obsession that ends in a place where we should probably all be paying attention to. At UPS, we wash our planes so often, our competitors think we're obsessed. In 2003, they wired up the fleet. GPS devices, vehicle sensors, the whole works. They started tracking how long drivers idled at intersections, how often they backed up, and whether the bulkhead door was open while the truck was moving. And what they realized looking at all that data was that the left turn problem they'd been solving since the '70s was actually just one variable in a much, much bigger problem.

[00:04:23]Because for a single driver on a single day with 120 stops, the number of possible route ordering is, and I'm not making this up, a number with 199 digits. That's a greater than the number of nanoseconds the Earth has existed.

[00:04:39]That's according to UPS themselves. No human with a clipboard is solving that.

[00:04:44]No loop, however cleverly drawn, is solving that either. You need math. You need a computer. You need something that can chew through billions of possibilities before the driver even finishes their coffee. So, they built something called Orion. Orion stands for On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation. It is a proprietary routing algorithm that UPS spent over a billion dollars developing. The project was led by a guy named Jack Levis, UPS's senior director of process management, who ran a team of mathematicians building this thing. And what Orion does is solve one of the oldest and most [music] famous problem in mathematics, something called the traveling salesman's problem.

[00:05:26]Traveling salesman problem? The traveling salesman problem. What's that?

[00:05:30]It poses the question of what's the most efficient way [music] to visit locations, just like a traveling salesman used to have to figure out. Given a list of stops, what's the most efficient order to visit them all? Except for UPS, this isn't some theoretical exercise you do on a whiteboard. It's real stops on real roads with real traffic and construction zones and customers who need their package by 3:00 p.m. That is the problem Orion solves every single morning before your driver starts the truck. Okay, but here's the thing about building a mathematically perfect route. Math and real life are two very different things.

[00:06:06]There's a great story from Orion's early days. An engineer was explaining the algorithm to a room of fifth graders and used an example where the optimal route had someone going to the grocery store before the barber shop. A kid immediately shot it down. She said, "My mom would never do that. You can't leave ice cream in the car while you get a haircut." [music] And that's Orion's whole challenge in one sentence. Math that works on paper versus math that works in a world where ice cream melts and businesses close at 5:00. It took years to teach the algorithm everything a human driver already knew in their bones. And when Orion was finally deployed, the engineers noticed something. The algorithm, left to optimize on its own, kept arriving at the same conclusion UPS had reached 50 years earlier with a clipboard. The conclusion was turn right. The math confirmed the instinct, and the results were staggering. UPS says Orion saves them around 10 million gallons of fuel every year and somewhere between 300 to 400 million dollars annually. All from a routing algorithm. That's I mean, that sounds insane. But, routes are only half of it. Because once you start looking at what happens inside the truck and what happens in the 15 seconds a driver is out of it, that's when UPS gets genuinely weird.

[00:07:25]UPS has this manual called the 340 methods. It prescribes exactly how a driver should perform almost every action in their day. There's a 12-step process for how to park the truck, locate a package, and step off the vehicle. And you're expected to complete all of that in 15.5 seconds. Drivers are required to carry their keys on their ring finger at all times so they never waste time fishing through a pocket.

[00:07:52]During training, instructors will just stop everyone and be like, "Raise your hands." And everyone has to show their keys dangling from their ring fingers.

[00:07:59]They must walk at what UPS calls a brisk pace, which is specifically defined as 2.5 steps per second. They're trained to buckle their seatbelt with their left hand while simultaneously starting the ignition with their right. They're taught to look at package labels and mentally visualize the delivery of every stop before they even leave the truck.

[00:08:18]Every single motion has been studied by industrial engineers and broken down into fewest possible steps. And by the way, UPS didn't pick 340 as a nice round number. It's actually the section number in their manual. There are, depending on who you ask, far more than 340 actual methods. And to train all of this, UPS spent 30 million dollars building a facility called Integrad outside of Washington, D.C. It took 3 years to finish with helps from teams at MIT.

[00:08:48]Inside, there's a fake village called Clarksville with miniature houses and street signs where trainees drive real UPS trucks and must [music] complete five deliveries in under 20 minutes.

[00:08:58]There's a grease runway called the slip and fall machine where trainees have to carry a 10-lb box across a slippery surface wearing shoes with no tread while strapped into a safety harness until they learn to take slow, careful steps. It's the only time UPS relaxes its brisk pace rule. During driving exercises, instructor will throw a football in front of the moving truck to test your reaction time. When you hop out to deliver a package, an instructor sneaks an orange traffic cone in front of the truck to see if you catch it before pulling away. If your brown uniform isn't ironed properly, you lose points for your team. Oh, and have you ever noticed that UPS trucks don't have door on the driver side? That's not a manufacturing mistake. It saves the driver the time of opening and closing a door at every single stop. Think about it. If you're making 200 stops a day and each door open close cost you 3 seconds, that's 10 minutes per driver per day.

[00:09:54]Multiply that across 100,000 trucks and you are looking at over a million hours a year. So, they just got rid of the door. And if all of this sounds insane to you, here is the math that makes it make sense. Jack Levis, the same guy who led the Orion project, put it this [music] way. 1 minute per driver per day over the course of a year adds up to $14.5 million.

[00:10:19]1 minute, $14.5 million.

[00:10:22]That's the equation behind everything you just heard. Is why they wrote 340 methods. Is why they built a fake town.

[00:10:29]Is why a key on the wrong finger is a training failure. When you operate at this scale, a 2-second improvement at every stop is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. At UPS, seconds are the currency. But, here's the problem with a company that converts seconds into dollars. Eventually, the math starts coming for the people. For decades, UPS trucks didn't have air conditioning. The company's argument was that since drivers are constantly getting in and out at every step, AC would be essentially useless. You never actually cool the cabin down. But, the real reason was less weight on every truck.

[00:11:07]Less fuel burn. Less mechanical complexity across the entire fleet. The problem is that without AC, cargo area temperatures regularly exceeded 120° in the summer. Drivers were collapsing on the job. Esteban Chavez was just 24 years old, a UPS driver found dead in his truck at the end of his delivery day. We're learning more about that alarming video of a UPS guy in distress from the extreme heat. He struggles to make it onto the front porch. Then, he collapses. It wasn't until 2023 when the union that represents UPS workers negotiated the AC into their contract that UPS finally agreed to start putting AC in new trucks. But, UPS has roughly 94,000 delivery vehicles. And even now, the vast majority still don't have AC.

[00:11:55]That's the other side of this equation.

[00:11:57]The seconds saved and the people who paid for them.

[00:12:01]And here's where the story takes a turn I'm honestly still processing.

[00:12:05]>> Atlanta-based logistics giant UPS is planning to cut up to 30,000 jobs this year. UPS has announced that they've cut 48,000 [music] jobs so far this year. In 2025, UPS eliminated 48,000 jobs. They plan to cut another 30,000 in 2026. That's 78,000 people gone in 2 years. And to accelerate the shift, they offered full-time drivers voluntary buyouts.

[00:12:32]Thousands took them. By the end of summer 2025, most were already gone. The same drivers who spent years memorizing their routes, who knew every closed gate and unmarked driveways, who could hit 120 stops in a shift without thinking, paid [music] to walk away. I want you to sit with that for a second. The same company that spent decades perfecting the 340 methods, that built a $30 million training facility with a fake town and a grease runway, that tracked the exact finger a driver would carry their keys on, is now paying those drivers to leave. [music] Because in the age of AI, the workers themselves have become the latest inefficiencies to optimize away.

[00:13:13]>> [music] >> And the people that UPS spent decades turning into the most efficient delivery force on the planet, they're now just another cost to be cut.

[00:13:22]>> UPS will now cut 48,000 [music] jobs. Shares, by the way, are up 12%. Is that if they can, it'll be 480,000.

[00:13:30]Because soon, the UPS will be completely automated.

[00:13:36]>> [music] >> And I don't know. That might just be the logical endpoint of a culture that has [music] spent 50 years shaving seconds off of everything. At some point, you run out of [music] seconds to shave.

[00:13:49]Then, you start shaving people. And I think that's the part of the story that [music] stays with me. Because UPS isn't some weird outlier. Every large company in the world right now is looking at their workforce the same way. Running the same math. Asking the same question.

[00:14:05]If we can automate it, why wouldn't [music] we? The left turn policy looked like a clever answer to a narrow problem. It wasn't. It was the first move of a philosophy.

[00:14:15]>> [music] >> The instinct to look at everything and ask what we can cut. And that philosophy is now running the [music] whole economy. And none of us really signed up for where it's headed.