A courier route is a sequence of stops, and every stop carries a fixed cost: park, walk, find the address, wait, walk back. Distance between stops is rarely the expensive part. The expensive part is the number of times that ritual repeats, and a pickup station attacks exactly that number by collapsing many stops into one.
Density is the unit of value
The useful question about a station is not how many parcels it can hold but how many separate door attempts it removes from a route in a day. A location with modest volume that sits inside a dense residential catchment can be worth more than a larger station serving a scattered one, because the parcels it holds would otherwise have been ten individual addresses.
- Count the door attempts inside the catchment, not the households.
- Weight locations by how naturally people already pass them.
- Prefer several stations in one dense area over one station per area.
- Treat walking distance as the real constraint, not driving distance.
Coverage without density is a cost
Networks that chase map coverage end up with stations that each absorb a handful of parcels. The courier still drives the same spread, the recipient still finds collection inconvenient, and the estate carries rent and maintenance for capacity nobody uses. Coverage is a result of density done repeatedly, not a substitute for it.
A station that removes one stop a day is furniture. A station that removes twenty is infrastructure.
That is why placement is reviewed with operations rather than settled by whoever offers the space. The station has to sit where the route already struggles, and it has to sit where the recipient was going anyway.