TrashCanBossPro Blog — Routes by Trash Day

Two Trailers, One City: Splitting Bin Cleaning Routes Between Rigs

The day you put a second trailer on the road is a good day. It is also the day routing gets harder. Two rigs in one city can double your cleanings, or they can spend the day passing each other on the same streets. The difference is how you split the work.

Start With the Same Foundation

Everything in Route Order for Bin Cleaning: Closest First or Furthest First From the Shop still applies with two trailers. Each trailer gets its own ordered list for the day. What changes is the step before: deciding which stops belong to which trailer.

In TrashCanBossPro, jobs are assigned to a trailer or truck. The Scheduled List can be filtered by trailer, so you can look at Trailer 1's day, then Trailer 2's, and auto-route each one from the shop on its own. Each tech logs in with the company login and their own PIN and sees only the jobs assigned to their rig. You are never billed per user, so the second tech costs nothing extra on the software side.

Split by Geography, Not by Alternating Stops

The worst way to split a route is to hand out stops one by one. Both trailers end up driving the whole city. The right way is to draw a line. North of the highway is Trailer 1, south is Trailer 2. East of the river is one rig, west is the other.

The line should follow the trash day map wherever possible. If the city runs Tuesday trash on both the north and south sides, Tuesday is a two-trailer day with a clean split. If Tuesday is only on the north side, maybe one trailer runs Tuesday and the other uses Tuesday for commercial stops, HOAs or catch-up.

Two Common Ways to Divide the Week

Split each day. Both trailers run the same trash day, each in its own half of the zone. This works when a single trash day has more stops than one trailer can finish. Both rigs follow the garbage truck through different streets at the same time.

Split the days. Each trailer owns certain trash days. Trailer 1 runs Monday and Wednesday zones, Trailer 2 runs Tuesday and Thursday. This works when each day fits on one trailer but the week has too many days for one crew. It also means each tech learns a smaller set of neighborhoods really well.

Most companies start with the second and move to the first as neighborhoods fill in.

Keep Each Tech on Familiar Streets

A tech who runs the same neighborhoods every week learns the gates, the dogs, the customers who leave cans on the side of the house, and the street where the truck always runs late. That knowledge makes every stop faster.

The can location notes on each address carry most of it to anyone who needs it, such as "left side of garage" or "behind gate, code in notes." Still, a tech on familiar streets reads those notes once and remembers. When you split a city, try to keep the split the same week after week so each trailer keeps its territory. See Can Location Notes and Gate Codes: Getting to the Cans Fast at Every Route Stop for writing notes that work for any tech.

Watch Both Rigs From the Office

Crew GPS from each tech's phone shows on the office map during the workday. With two trailers out, that matters. When a customer calls about a missed can, the office can see which trailer is closer. When one trailer finishes early, the office can see where it is and move a few stops over from the other.

Moving stops between trailers is a matter of reassigning the job on the board. The stop disappears from one tech's phone and appears on the other's, in the order you set.

Balancing the Load

Two trailers rarely have equal days. One neighborhood fills faster than another, or one tech works faster. Look at the Scheduled List for each trailer on each day and compare the number of stops and the spread on the map. If one is regularly finishing at 1pm and the other at 5pm, move the line.

The fix is usually small. Shift one neighborhood near the border from the busy trailer to the light one. Keep the move permanent, so the tech who picks up that neighborhood can learn it.

Do not forget the customer side. Customers who use the app see their place in line on today's route. If their stop moves to the other trailer, the count updates to the new route, so they still know when to expect the crew.

The Short Version

Draw a line on the map that follows trash day zones, give each trailer its own territory and keep it stable, filter the board by trailer and route each rig on its own, and use crew GPS to rebalance when one finishes early. For the rest of the routing tools, return to the bin cleaning route software page.