Short answer: general driving statistics provide context. A delivery baseline comes from your own route time, distance, completed stops and failed attempts.
Key takeaways
- AAA's 2024 survey reports 60.4 minutes and 31.1 miles of driving per driver per day in the United States.
- The survey covers general driving across the U.S. population.
- The older 293-hour estimate came from the 2014–2015 survey and used a different method.
- Comparable delivery days reveal where route time is changing.
What the latest AAA survey says
AAA Foundation's 2024 American Driving Survey reports an average of 60.4 driving minutes, 31.1 miles and 2.44 driving trips per driver per day. The results were statistically unchanged from 2023. The survey interviewed about 5,100 people during each year and weighted the responses to the U.S. population.
The figures cover personal and work-related driving across the United States. They provide scale and recent context. They cannot describe a courier route in Sofia, Warsaw or another MileCut market.
Why the old 293-hour figure still appears
AAA's 2014–2015 survey reported 47.1 minutes of daily driving, which annualises to about 294 hours. Many articles rounded or repeated the result as 293 hours. AAA later updated its survey method, so the 2014–2015 and 2024 results belong to separate survey periods.
For delivery planning, the useful question concerns the current operation: how much time and distance does each completed stop require on comparable days?
Build a baseline from your own routes
Track four figures for each delivery day: planned kilometres, actual kilometres where vehicle or navigation records are available, time from departure to final stop, and completed deliveries. Add failed attempts separately rather than hiding them inside the route average.
Compare days with a similar number of stops and a similar service area. A route with 20 city-centre stops should not be compared with a route containing 20 widely separated rural stops. Note unusual road closures, severe weather, or customer delays so they do not distort the result.
A simple comparison
Distance per completed stop = total route distance ÷ completed stops.
Also track route minutes per completed stop. If both measures fall across several comparable days, the change is more meaningful than a single unusually good route.
Where route planning helps
MileCut lets you import an Excel or CSV list, review detected addresses, arrange stops using the road network and compare plans with different numbers of couriers. Review the proposed plan before creating the routes. Drivers then open their assigned routes in Google Maps. Results depend on the addresses, road conditions and decisions made by the dispatcher.
See the current limits and features on the pricing page, or test the workflow with your own address list during the 7-day Team trial.
Sources
The survey figures describe U.S. drivers. They are context for measurement and do not predict a MileCut result.
Measure your own delivery day.
Plan a real address list and compare it with the method you use today.