Tips for delivery driving

Mark McIlroy


2021


1. Buy a pair of rubber soled shoes. If you try to use leather soled shoes you will probably damage a leg in the first week on wet polished granite.


2. Buy a high-vis reflective tape vest for the day and a high-vis reflective tape rain jacket for night.


3. If the house doesn't have a number on the letterbox or on the house itself, look for a number on the rubbish bins, the number of the house next door, or an accurate GPS map reading.


4. Check the delivery address at the door otherwise there are a lot of problems if it is delivered to the wrong house.


5. Buy a large commercial grade thermal bag, and a separate bag for pizzas, and take it into the restaurant and to the house. It must have a heavy duty zip.



Part 2.


1. Be careful when reversing especially at night. A clear view through the rear window doesn't mean that it is safe to reverse as depending on the street there may be: metal poles only 3 feet high, rubbish bins, or low height metal trailers.


2. A preferred car for deliveries is: moderately old (as minor dints may be happen at the start from obstacles) high fuel efficiently, high reliability, low ongoing maintenance costs, clear windows not tinted for clear vision at night, reversing lights, reversing camera.


2022

Part 3.

Navigation

1. Some delivery platforms may cause a GPS location to be a short distance from the customer's house. This can occur when the app sends addresses to the GPS system as latitude and longitude coordinates instead of a street address.

If you arrive at the GPS destination and it is on the wrong side of a barrier or park, enter the actual customer's address into the GPS and follow that.


2. At times when navigating to a customer's house you will encounter a road that is closed for roadworks.

In these cases, zoom the map out until you can see an entire clear path to the customer's house, then manually follow the clear path.


2023

Part 4.

Spacer boxes

1. Sometimes a restaurant will pack a tall narrow stack of containers. When this happens, the first time you go over a speed hump the stack will fall over, the container lids will pop off and the food will spill.

To avoid this problem, put the container stack in your thermal bag and fill the empty space with a tall narrow empty cardboard box.

2. Always place the food where the customer will be able to open their front door without knocking the paper bags over.