A tour schedule that looks illogical on a map is usually the solution to several constraints at once. Routing is a scheduling problem where geography is only one of the inputs.
The crew, not the artist, sets the distance limit
Production travels overnight by truck and bus, and the practical limit between cities is what can be driven safely while the crew rests.
Load-in for a large production begins early in the morning and takes most of the day, so arrival time governs whether the show can happen at all.
Routes are therefore built as chains of manageable drives, and a city outside that radius must be reached by adding a travel day nobody earns money on. Distance is measured in hours behind the wheel rather than miles.
Venue availability breaks the obvious order
Arenas and theaters are booked far ahead for sports, conferences and other tours, so the available dates in each city are scattered rather than contiguous.
A routing has to take the dates that exist, which regularly means passing a city and returning to it weeks later.
The alternative is a better-looking map with worse buildings or worse nights of the week, which costs more in attendance than the drive saves.
Radius clauses restrict where else an act can play
Promoters and festivals commonly require that an artist not perform within a certain distance for a period before and after a date.
The clause protects the promoter's investment, since a nearby show weeks earlier draws from the same audience they are paying to reach.
Those restrictions carve holes in the map that routing must work around, and they are a routine subject of negotiation rather than an unusual imposition.
Days off are expensive and necessary
A dark day still costs buses, hotels, crew wages and trucks, so the schedule pushes toward consecutive shows wherever the drive allows.
Performers need recovery time, particularly singers, and a schedule with no margin collapses when illness arrives rather than bending.
Routing therefore places rest days where they double as travel days, which is why long drives and days off tend to coincide.
Markets are weighted by expected demand
Cities where an act has sold well before receive dates first, and the surrounding routing is built outward from those anchors.
Streaming and ticketing data now indicate where an audience exists before a tour is announced, which has changed which cities appear on smaller runs.
A city omitted from a tour is usually one the numbers did not support, rather than one that was forgotten. The routing reflects where an audience was measured, not where it was assumed.