Empty running – vehicles travelling without a paying load, most commonly on the return leg after a delivery – remains one of the largest sources of avoidable cost in road freight despite decades of attention and a widely shared understanding that it is a problem worth solving. Industry estimates consistently put empty running at somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of total road freight kilometres across Europe, a figure that has proven stubbornly difficult to reduce structurally even as individual shippers and carriers make genuine efforts to address it. RoadFreightCompany treats backhaul planning as a standing part of its network operations rather than an occasional optimisation project, and has a clear view of why the problem persists and what actually moves the number.
Why Empty Running Persists Even When Everyone Wants to Fix It
The core difficulty with backhaul matching is timing and geography alignment: a vehicle finishing a delivery in a specific location at a specific time needs a return load originating near that location at a compatible time, and the probability of a good match existing at the moment it is needed depends on freight density in that area, which varies enormously by region and by time of day. A single shipper’s own network, however large, rarely generates enough return-direction freight on every lane to fill every empty leg, which is why backhaul solutions that rely purely on a shipper’s own volume hit a ceiling that broader freight pooling does not.
Contractual and commercial fragmentation compounds the geography problem – a carrier’s empty leg after delivering for one shipper is not automatically visible or available to another shipper with a compatible backhaul need, because the two commercial relationships and the systems that manage them are typically separate. The backhaul network RoadFreightCompany operates draws on freight across multiple client relationships specifically to widen the pool of potential matches beyond what any single client’s own volume could generate, because the structural fix for empty running is broader freight density, not better matching software applied to a limited pool.
Backhaul Matching That Actually Works Operationally
Backhaul matching that works reliably in practice requires more than a freight exchange platform listing available loads and available capacity – it requires the operational discipline to confirm a match early enough that the collecting vehicle can actually be routed to it without disrupting the forward schedule that got it there in the first place. A backhaul opportunity identified after the vehicle has already been released back to base is a missed opportunity regardless of how good the matching technology was.
Reliability of the backhaul load matters as much as its existence – a return load that turns out to be delayed, or smaller than advertised, or requiring equipment the vehicle does not have, creates more disruption than running empty would have, which is why backhaul programmes that do not vet the reliability of the loads being matched tend to lose driver and carrier buy-in quickly. The backhaul matching process RoadFreightCompany runs verifies load readiness and equipment compatibility before confirming a match, because a backhaul programme’s credibility with drivers and carriers depends on the matched loads actually being there when the vehicle arrives.
What Backhaul Optimisation Costs to Get Right
Reducing empty running is not free – it requires investment in the visibility systems that make available capacity and available freight known to each other in time to act on it, and it requires accepting some routing complexity and schedule flexibility that a purely forward-optimised network would not need. The return on that investment is nonetheless substantial, because every empty kilometre eliminated is a kilometre of cost with no corresponding value-generating movement to offset it.
The reduction achievable through disciplined backhaul management varies by lane density and freight type, but operations that invest in it consistently move empty running from the twenty to twenty-five percent range down toward the low teens, a reduction that shows up directly in cost per kilometre across the network. Building that visibility and matching discipline into standard network operations, rather than running it as an occasional initiative, is the investment Road Freight Company has made in its own backhaul capability, because the empty running reduction only holds if the matching discipline is applied consistently rather than in bursts.
Empty running is not a problem that gets solved once – it is a discipline that has to be maintained continuously against the natural tendency of a network to default back to point-to-point, one-directional planning.
The networks that keep empty running lowest are those with enough freight density, visibility, and matching discipline to find and confirm backhaul opportunities before the vehicle is released, not after.
For networks whose empty running sits above the achievable range for their freight density, RoadFreightCompany can assess where the backhaul opportunity is being missed and what it would take to capture it.