For many European shippers, transport volumes in 2025 look deceptively stable. Shipment counts have not collapsed, tender volumes remain within familiar ranges, and overall activity appears resilient. Yet operationally, something is clearly off. Carriers report declining efficiency. Rates remain under pressure despite “normal” demand. And one metric keeps quietly climbing across the continent: empty kilometers. RoadFreightCompany’s monitoring of pan-European road networks shows that this trend is now structural rather than cyclical.
The rise in empty mileage is not driven by a single factor, but by structural misalignment between how freight flows are planned and how capacity actually moves. Traditional planning assumes that stable volumes produce stable flows. In reality, European freight has become increasingly directional. Loads concentrate in specific corridors, time windows, and short cycles, while return flows fragment or disappear altogether. RoadFreightCompany observes that many lanes appearing balanced in tenders now function as operationally one-way corridors in practice.
One of the main drivers is temporal mismatch. Shippers compress delivery windows to protect downstream operations, but pickup flexibility does not expand accordingly. Carriers are forced to reposition equipment to meet tight outbound schedules, often without a viable backhaul. Even small shifts in cutoff times or warehouse availability can break what used to be workable round trips. The result is more deadhead mileage hidden inside “successful” executions.
Another contributor is corridor volatility. Border sensitivity, localized controls, and ad-hoc disruptions change routing behavior week by week. A carrier that relied on a predictable return flow through one crossing suddenly avoids it, creating longer repositioning legs. From the shipper’s perspective, service still happens. From the carrier’s perspective, efficiency collapses. Operational cases reviewed by RoadFreightCompany show that these routing adjustments often increase empty mileage without any visible deterioration in headline service KPIs.
Network fragmentation plays a role as well. As shippers diversify carriers to manage risk, loads are spread across more providers with smaller volume shares. This reduces each carrier’s ability to internally balance flows. What looks like risk mitigation at the shipper level often increases inefficiency at the network level. Capacity becomes thinner, coordination weaker, and repositioning more frequent.
Importantly, empty kilometers rarely show up as a line item. Their cost is embedded in rates, surcharges, and declining carrier margins. Over time, this erodes service quality and pushes carriers toward subcontracting or selective lane participation. Shippers then experience “capacity shortages” in lanes that are technically well supplied – a paradox created by inefficiency rather than lack of trucks.
Some organizations are beginning to address this directly. Instead of optimizing lanes in isolation, they look at flow pairs and temporal symmetry. They allow broader pickup windows where possible. They coordinate volume releases across facilities rather than site by site. Most critically, they accept that a perfectly priced one-way lane often costs more system-wide than a slightly higher-priced balanced one.
The rise of empty kilometers is not a carrier problem or a shipper problem. It is a network design problem. As long as freight planning focuses on individual lanes instead of flow behavior, inefficiency will continue to grow beneath the surface. RoadFreight Company sees that organizations which redesign flows rather than renegotiate rates are the ones most successfully slowing the growth of empty mileage. In a market where margins are thin and volatility is structural, reducing empty kilometers is no longer about cost optimization – it is about restoring basic operability to European road freight.