Every delivery driver uses GPS. But there's a significant difference between following GPS passively and using it actively and intelligently. Here's what separates drivers who fight the route from drivers who own it.
Know When to Trust It and When to Override
GPS is excellent at finding the correct address. It's decent at routing you there. It's mediocre at knowing that the shortcut it wants you to take is a narrow residential street that a delivery van can't navigate, or that the left turn it's suggesting has a no-left-turn sign that's been there for five years.
Within the first few weeks on a route, you'll start to learn the local overrides: the street that GPS always routes you down that backs up every afternoon, the turn that looks shorter but costs you three lights, the apartment complex that GPS takes you to the wrong entrance of. Write these down if needed, and add them to your pre-route mental prep.
Don't Look at the Screen While Moving
This should go without saying, but delivery drivers look at their phones while driving at an alarming rate. In a GPS app, you should be listening to audio cues between stops and only looking at the screen when you're fully stopped.
Mount your phone where you can glance at it without taking your eyes off the road for more than a second. A dash mount or suction cup windshield mount keeps it at eye level and in your peripheral view. Phone in your hand while driving is a traffic violation and a crash risk.
Use Offline Maps When Possible
Delivery often takes you through areas with spotty data coverage. If your GPS app supports offline maps, download the areas you cover regularly. Offline maps don't require a live data connection to navigate, which prevents the frustrating freeze at the worst possible moment.
Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Waze all have offline functionality. It takes five minutes to set up and has saved many drivers from getting lost in a dead zone.
Multi-Stop Routing in Your App
If your delivery app doesn't handle multi-stop routing well, a secondary tool like Google Maps (which allows up to 9 waypoints in a trip) can help you plan micro-clusters more efficiently. This isn't always necessary, but on complex routes where you have flexibility on sequence, mapping a cluster of 5–6 nearby stops together can reveal the optimal driving order that saves a mile or two.
Know What Your App Doesn't Know
GPS doesn't know about private roads, weight restrictions on local bridges, construction closures posted today, or seasonal road conditions. Keep a mental layer running over your GPS data — the real-world context that your app doesn't have. That combination is what makes an experienced driver faster and safer than one who's just following directions.
JWA Logistics uses routing software that gets drivers where they need to be — but your local knowledge and driver judgment are what make every route better than an algorithm alone.