PlatformStreet turns · Double moves
Street turns, or the empty that never goes back
A street turn takes the container you just stripped at a consignee and puts it straight under an export booking. The box never goes back to the terminal, and the exporter never sends a truck to the depot for an empty. Two moves become one. This is the street turn software DrayBase is being built around — and none of it is written yet.
01The arithmetic
Why one turn is worth chasing
The saving is not a percentage anyone has to take on faith. Without the turn, the same box costs you a run back to the terminal or depot, and the export costs somebody a run out to fetch an empty. Neither of those legs carries freight. A street turn deletes both.
- Two legs
- Consignee to depot with an empty, then depot to shipper with the same kind of empty. Both are paid miles that move no cargo. The turn replaces them with one short hop between two customers who are usually in the same county.
- Two gates
- A return transaction and an empty pickup transaction, each with its own appointment, its own queue and its own chance of being turned away at the lane. A street turn has no gate move at all.
- Chassis days
- One chassis stays under one box for the whole pair instead of two units running two separate errands, and the pool bill is shorter for the same work.
- The clock
- Per diem runs from gate out until the box is interchanged. Turning it onto an export ends that exposure on the day the exporter takes it — instead of on the day the terminal finally has an empty return slot for that line.
- The day they stop taking empties
- When a terminal closes returns for a line and your yard fills with boxes still accruing, a street turn is not an optimization. It is the only way to stop the meter.
A turn is not a discount. It is work you never did.
02The pair
One import, one booking, seven things that must match
A street turn is a pairing problem, and pairing problems are what software is actually good at. The fields a matcher needs — line, size, type, import or export, booking number, empty return location, free time — are already columns on the container record. What is missing is the thing that reads them and proposes the pair.
Illustration of a candidate pair — sample data, not live. The line and both parties are fictional, and DrayBase does not produce this screen today.
The dispatcher who remembers is the bottleneck.
Today a turn happens because someone recalls that an exporter down the road needs that size from that line this week. It works, and it stops working the moment that person is on vacation or the board has two hundred rows on it.
03Double moves
One gate visit, two transactions
When no export fits, the next best thing is a dual transaction: drop the empty and pull the next import in the same visit. The driver queues once instead of twice and the bobtail leg between the two trips disappears. Same idea as a street turn, one gate short of it.
- Terminal
- The empty has to be accepted where the next import sits, which is not a given even inside the same port.Planned
- Windows
- Two appointments that overlap, or a terminal that issues a dual transaction on one reference. Appointments are already modelled per move and per container; booking them is not.Planned
- Driver
- Where the tractor actually is, and whether the hours left cover a queue that turns ninety minutes into three hours.Planned
- Equipment
- The chassis under the empty has to be the chassis the next box can leave on, or the pair costs you a flip inside the yard.Planned
- The number
- Miles and hours saved, stated per pair, so the practice can be measured instead of believed.Planned
04What exists today
The model is here. The engine is not.
This is the whole feature, split into the part that is written and the part that is not. We publish it this way because a carrier evaluating a pre-launch product deserves to know which half they are looking at.
Everything in the right column is unbuilt. No dates are attached to it, here or anywhere else on this site.
Early access
Tell us which line refuses your turns
Which carriers authorize turns in NY / NJ, how long the approval takes and what your terminals do with dual transactions is exactly the knowledge this feature has to be built on. If you run Newark or Elizabeth, that conversation is worth more to us than a signature.