Route Density

Route density measures how many residential doors a carrier passes per unit of walking distance or time. The two common expressions are doors-per-mile (or doors-per-kilometre) for static planning and doors-per-hour for cost modelling. Both numbers determine whether a given neighborhood is economically viable for door-hanger distribution.

A dense urban Calgary block — single-family homes on 30-foot lots in inner-city neighborhoods like Bridgeland or Sunnyside — yields roughly 250 to 400 doors per walking mile. A typical suburban subdivision built between 1990 and 2010, with 50-foot lots and crescents that double back, yields 150 to 250 doors per mile. Acreage areas and rural-residential developments outside the city ring road can drop below 30 doors per mile, at which point the carrier spends more time walking driveways than delivering hangers and the per-door cost rises by a factor of five or more.

Route density drives three planning decisions. First, zone definition: distribution providers build their zone boundaries to keep average density above an internal threshold (StreetDrop targets a minimum of roughly 150 doors per mile across the zone average). Second, carrier compensation: routes are quoted per door or per zone, not per hour, so high-density routes are profitable and low-density routes are loss-makers unless explicitly upcharged. Third, customer ROI math: the contractor's cost per lead falls in lockstep with route density because the printing and design costs are fixed regardless of how spread out the homes are.

For contractors, route density is also a strategic lens on which neighborhoods to target. A junk-removal company gets the best return-on-spend in older established neighborhoods where homes are dense, homeowners are mid-life with accumulated possessions, and a single Saturday route can stack eight booked jobs within a few blocks. A roofing company may deliberately pay the density penalty to hit a low-density acreage zone because the average roof value is two to three times higher and the math still works.

The metric is also why "EDDM equivalents" do not exist in Canada at the same cost ratio. The USPS EDDM program externalises the route-density problem onto the federal letter carrier, who is walking the route anyway. A privately operated door-hanger delivery in Canada cannot subsidize a low-density route the same way, so providers either price the rural zones higher or decline them altogether.

Route density is sometimes confused with population density. The two correlate but are not the same: a high-rise neighborhood may have high population density and very low door density, because a single locked lobby may represent two hundred units the carrier cannot legally access.