By Jared Ebersole in Video — 04 Mar 2026

Why the Long Way Around Can Be the Fastest Route

UPS avoids left turns to save fuel and reduce risk. Manhattan's one-way grid often forces drivers into the same counterintuitive logic.

Sometimes the fastest way to go left is to turn right three times.

It feels wrong until you drive in Manhattan long enough. A cab passes your destination, turns right, turns right again, then comes back from the other side. It looks inefficient on a map. In traffic, it can be the cleaner move.

That same idea is famous inside UPS.

The company's routing systems try to reduce left turns in countries where drivers use the right side of the road. The reason is simple: a left turn often means waiting across oncoming traffic, sitting through light cycles, blocking a lane, judging gaps, and crossing pedestrians. Even when the distance is shorter, the turn can cost more time, more fuel, and more risk.

UPS did not literally ban every left turn. Some are unavoidable. But its routing strategy heavily penalizes them, and the company has repeatedly credited route optimization with major savings. INFORMS estimates UPS's ORION system reduces annual fuel consumption by about 10 million gallons and cuts carbon dioxide production by about 100,000 metric tons. Other reporting has described typical UPS routes with left turns reduced to roughly 10 percent of total turns.

The counterintuitive part is that a longer route can use less fuel.

Fuel is not burned only by distance. It is burned by stopping, idling, accelerating, braking, and waiting. A truck moving steadily around a block may spend less energy than a truck sitting at a light waiting for a left-turn gap. For a single driver, the difference is small. For a fleet making millions of stops, small differences become infrastructure.

New York did not invent this as a logistics strategy. But Manhattan makes the same logic visible.

The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 created the numbered grid north of Houston Street, but the grid did not originally mean every street was one-way. The one-way traffic system grew later as the city tried to handle the explosion of cars, buses, trucks, taxis, and deliveries. Today, most numbered crosstown streets follow a simple rhythm: even-numbered streets generally run east, odd-numbered streets generally run west, with exceptions for wider two-way streets and special segments.

That rhythm changes left turns from a choice into a constraint.

If you are on a one-way avenue and the cross street you want runs the wrong direction, a left turn is not merely inconvenient. It is illegal or physically impossible. The grid pushes you to overshoot, loop, and approach from the correct side. Manhattan drivers are constantly solving little geometry problems that look wasteful until you include signals, turning restrictions, bus lanes, pedestrians, cyclists, loading zones, and the fact that every intersection is already busy.

This is why navigation apps sometimes seem to route like a local. They are not always choosing the shortest line. They are choosing the path with lower friction: fewer bad turns, fewer impossible turns, fewer lefts across traffic, fewer intersections where the vehicle will sit while the clock runs.

The safety argument matters too. Federal crash research consistently treats intersections as one of the most complex and dangerous parts of the road system, and left-turn conflicts are a major reason. A left-turning driver has to manage oncoming vehicles, signal timing, pedestrians in the crosswalk, cyclists, and the blind spots created by other vehicles. That is a lot of judgment packed into a few seconds.

Avoiding left turns is not a universal law. In some cities, at some times, on some streets, the direct turn is still better. But the broader principle is powerful: efficiency is not the same as distance.

Cities are full of routes that are longer on paper and faster in reality. Elevators skip floors. Subway riders walk to a different entrance. Delivery drivers circle a block. A cab loops around instead of forcing a left turn through a crowd.

The line on the map is only the beginning.

The real route is the one that moves.