What is Service time?
The minutes spent at a stop between arrival and completion — the number that decides whether a planned delivery day is achievable.
Service time is the part of a delivery that is not driving: parking, walking, the buzzer, the lift, the handoff, the proof capture. It is the most consequential number in route planning and the one most operations have never measured.
The default assumption is always too low. A planner assuming three minutes per stop for a fleet whose real median is eleven will produce a day that is impossible by mid-morning, and the ETAs will drift further out of touch with every stop.
Measure it as a median rather than a mean, and split it by stop type. Residential doorsteps, apartment blocks with a buzzer, business receptions and loading docks are genuinely different, often by a factor of three, and one route full of the slow kind will quietly consume an hour a day.
In PrivateMile: arrival is detected by geofence and completion is timestamped, so service time is measured from what actually happened rather than estimated — and the measured figure is what planning and ETAs are built on.