Empty miles – kilometres driven by a truck without cargo – are one of the most visible inefficiencies in road freight, and one of the most accepted. A vehicle that delivers to a destination and returns empty has covered half its total distance without generating revenue or moving useful cargo. Across a fleet, across a year, the fuel cost, driver time, and emissions associated with empty running represent a significant and largely avoidable operational waste. The industry average for empty running in European road freight sits between twenty and thirty percent of total kilometres driven. The operations that perform better than that average do so through deliberate planning rather than good fortune. At RoadFreightCompany, reducing empty miles is a standing planning objective rather than an occasional efficiency exercise – because every empty kilometre eliminated improves margin, reduces emissions, and makes the overall operation more competitive.
Why Empty Miles Accumulate
Empty running is partly structural – a vehicle that delivers to a location with no return load available has no alternative – and partly the result of planning failures that leave return load opportunities unidentified or unmatched. The structural element is manageable with the right network design. The planning element is where most of the improvement opportunity lies.
The most common sources of avoidable empty running are: return legs from dedicated deliveries that were booked without considering backload availability, single-customer route planning that ignores consolidation opportunities with nearby collections, and ad hoc bookings that do not fit the existing route structure and generate isolated movements with no return potential. Each of these represents a planning decision made without full information about what else was available – and each is addressable with better information and a more systematic approach to matching outbound and inbound freight.
The carriers who achieve the lowest empty running rates are those who plan across their full vehicle network rather than optimising individual lanes in isolation. That network-level view requires visibility of all available freight – both the carrier’s own contracted volumes and the spot market – and the planning capability to match loads across that broader picture. That planning approach is how RoadFreightCompany manages its route network – treating backload opportunity as a standard part of the route planning process rather than an afterthought.
Backload Planning – The Primary Tool
A backload is a return load that fills a vehicle on the leg that would otherwise run empty. Identifying and securing backloads requires either a network large enough that return loads exist within the carrier’s own client base, or access to a freight exchange where loads from other shippers can be matched to available vehicles.
The economics of backloads are straightforward. A vehicle that covers its fixed and variable costs on the outbound leg can carry a return load at a rate that reflects marginal cost – primarily fuel and driver time – rather than full cost recovery. For the shipper booking the backload, the rate is below standard market levels. For the carrier, the revenue contribution from a load that would otherwise be empty running is positive at almost any rate above marginal cost. Both parties benefit from a match that would not exist without the planning process to identify it.
The practical challenge is timing and flexibility. A backload opportunity requires the return leg timing to align with the collection and delivery requirements of the available freight. Rigid route schedules that cannot accommodate a reasonable timing variation to capture a backload opportunity leave empty miles that a more flexible operation would have filled. Building that flexibility into route planning – as a standing operational objective rather than a case-by-case decision – is what separates carriers who consistently achieve low empty running rates from those who accept empty miles as an unavoidable feature of the business.
What Shippers Can Do
Empty miles are not exclusively a carrier problem. Shippers have a direct influence on empty running through the booking behaviours and information they provide. A shipper who provides accurate forward volume information allows their carrier to plan routes with return load potential in mind. One who books freight at short notice, with narrow timing requirements, reduces the planning flexibility that backload matching requires.
Shippers who are willing to accept modest timing flexibility on non-critical lanes – a collection window of four hours rather than a specific time, a delivery window that extends into the following morning – create significantly more backload opportunity for their carrier. That flexibility has a value that is often not explicitly recognised in the commercial relationship, but which carriers factor into how they price and resource a lane. A shipper who consistently enables backload opportunities is a more valuable commercial partner than one who does not – and that value tends to show up in rate stability and capacity priority when the market tightens.
Freight consolidation is the shipper-side equivalent of backload planning – combining shipments that would have moved separately onto a single vehicle, reducing the total distance covered per unit of cargo. The planning discipline required is similar: forward visibility of freight volumes, flexibility on timing, and a carrier relationship that supports the matching process. The emissions and cost benefits compound in the same direction as backload planning, making consolidation and backload strategy natural complements rather than alternatives. Treating empty mile reduction as a shared objective – something both shipper and carrier contribute to through their respective planning behaviours – is the framing that produces the most consistent results. That shared objective is how RoadFreightCompany approaches the conversation with clients on lanes where empty running data indicates meaningful improvement potential.
Measuring and Managing Empty Running
Empty running is one of those metrics that is easy to calculate but rarely tracked in most operations. Total kilometres driven divided by loaded kilometres driven gives an empty running percentage that can be benchmarked against industry averages and tracked over time as planning improvements are implemented.
Operations that track this metric consistently find that the improvement trajectory is front-loaded – the first round of planning adjustments produces the largest gains, as the most obvious backload opportunities are identified and matched. Subsequent improvements require more sophisticated matching and greater flexibility, but the baseline improvement is typically achievable with relatively modest changes to planning practice.
The environmental dimension of empty mile reduction has become increasingly relevant as shippers face growing pressure to reduce the carbon footprint of their supply chains. Every empty kilometre eliminated is a direct reduction in fuel consumption and emissions – and the same planning changes that reduce empty running for commercial reasons also improve sustainability metrics. That alignment between commercial efficiency and environmental performance makes empty mile reduction one of the most clearly justified logistics investments available.
The operations that run with the lowest empty mile rates share a consistent characteristic: they treat every vehicle movement as a planning problem with a return leg dimension, not just an outbound one. That discipline, applied consistently across a fleet and a network, produces compounding efficiency gains that show up in lower cost per kilometre, better emissions performance, and a freight operation that is structurally more competitive than one where empty running is simply accepted. Getting to that standard requires the right data, the right planning tools, and a carrier relationship that makes the matching process possible – all of which Road Freight Company brings to clients where empty mile reduction is an identified priority.
Empty miles are a cost that most freight operations carry without fully accounting for it. The fuel, the driver time, the emissions, and the opportunity cost of capacity that moved nothing useful are all real – and they are all reducible with planning approaches that are available today.
The gap between the industry average and the best-performing operations on empty running is not explained by technology or scale. It is explained by planning discipline and the commercial relationships that support it. Closing that gap is one of the more straightforward efficiency improvements available in road freight – and one of the few that benefits cost, emissions, and service reliability simultaneously.