Route Density
Route density describes how tightly recurring service stops are packed within a geography and a service cycle. It is a delivery-cost variable: the same plan price yields a different margin depending on how far a technician travels between visits and whether a day's sequence fills a shift. Because density is held by routing systems while price is held by billing systems, an account's contribution splits across two records, and the events that change density - a cancellation, a pause, a new sale on a served street - are priced in only one of them.
Definition
A route day is an ordered set of stops served by one technician within one shift. Density is the relationship between the serviceable addresses on that day, the distance between them, and the interval on which each of them recurs. It governs the proportion of a paid visit spent travelling rather than working, and it sets how much of a shift a sequence can absorb. Density is not a property of a customer; it is a property of the neighbourhood around a customer at a point in time, which is why it changes whenever nearby accounts are added, paused or lost, without any change to the customer's own plan.
Why it matters
A business that bills recurring plans centrally and delivers them locally holds price and delivery cost in different systems, and its reporting inherits the split. Retention is expressed in plan value, capacity is expressed in technician hours, and neither view carries the other's units. Density is the variable that connects them, and it makes two decisions concrete: which losses are the expensive ones, and which addresses are worth acquiring. Acquisition targeting that ignores it pays the same price for stops whose delivery economics are not the same.