Known on the day
A Second Stop
It sounds like a detour and it is not. A second stop changes how long the vehicle is committed, and time committed is what an operator is actually selling.
- What the desk writes down
- Where the extra stop is, whether somebody is joining or leaving there, and how long the car is expected to wait.
- Why no number can be named without it
- The operator sold a span of time between two points. A third point extends the span and may collide with whatever the vehicle is doing next.
- What happens when it changes
- This entry is the change. It is passed on as a new shape of job, not as a footnote to the old one.
What an operator is really selling
Not a distance. A block of time in which a particular vehicle and driver are unavailable for anything else.
A second stop extends that block, and it extends it by an amount nobody can state exactly: the extra travel, plus however long somebody takes to appear. That uncertainty is the part operators care about, more than the mileage.
The three things the desk needs
- Where. In full, the same way both ends were written.
- Who. Somebody joining, or somebody leaving, because a car that gains a passenger has to have had room for them all along.
- How long. An honest expectation of the wait, not an optimistic one.
Missing any of the three makes the question unanswerable, and the operator will simply ask it back.
What it costs
Nothing at this end, whatever the notice. No money reaches this desk from a traveler in any circumstance, and no page of this site carries a field for a card.
What the operator does about it is the operator's tariff, which this desk does not set and does not print. That is the same answer as everywhere else on this site and it is the honest one: no figure appears here because a desk without an operator agreement has no figure to print.
Told late
The same shape as everything else in this moment. Early it is arithmetic. At the curb it is a driver on a schedule being asked to change it, and the answer is often no.
Known on the day, one of three moments in the intake