About Slack

Slack is the amount of time in minutes between events, excluding travel time or load and unload time.

Passengers may or may not be on board. Slack is considered beneficial to a schedule because it provides flexibility in a schedule in case a run event takes longer than usual or if another client event can be inserted into the schedule to reduce deadhead time elsewhere.

In the following example, the scheduled pick-up time for PU3 is 10:00 AM and the scheduled pick-up time for PU2 is 10:30 AM, but the travel time between both locations is only 15 minutes, resulting in 15 minutes of slack.

If a trip is inserted between PU3 and PU2 that takes 15 minutes or less to travel to and perform, then slack would be reduced by that amount.