improved vehicle dispatching

We know that before vehicles take off on a job, they do a pathing check to see if they can reach it. However, they seem to take jobs based on which one is the closest in a straight line rather than which one has the shortest path. There might be buildings or a mountain in the way. Truck don't care. He just takes off on a long journey anyway. It seems to me like to save computations the game first chooses a job based on direct distance, then does the pathing computation to see if it's possible to get there. There are a lot of situations where this is not ideal. But I also can see, you don't want to do twenty or a hundred pathing computations before assigning every job. But, I don't know, maybe take the top 3 line of sight results and then do pathing computations on those three and choose the best one? That could be a happy medium.

Tbh, pretty sure pathing would be far more intensive, if it was more advanced than that, and it is a balance of pathing quality and max truck cap. I think that is probably part of the reason Logistic zones are a thing now, specially with the larger maps. Maybe a adjustable slider for max path range, that if the calculated path is over it will look for a different vehicle to take the job and see if the path is shorter, keeps that first truck reserved while it tries to find a better one and then just lets the first one do the job if it cant find a better one?

I agree this is an issue that needs a solution. Since the vehicle does a pathfinding check, if a value similar to distance could be created for the distance of the path while running the pathfinding check, and that value compared against the LOS distance...anything over about 2 times higher than the LOS would cause a re-check among available vehicles, and the one with the lowest ratio of path distance to LOS distance is chosen.
I'd also encourage a different evaluation...if a job is near completion (say a truck is about to deliver a bit of cargo, it does a check for other jobs being requested in the area of its destination and queues it up so trucks on the other side of the mountain aren't triggered to come where a vehicle already exists.