Empty kilometers are one of the oldest topics in European road freight – and one of the least honestly addressed. Everyone agrees they are inefficient. Everyone claims to minimize them. And yet, in practice, empty runs remain structurally embedded in most transport networks. Not because companies ignore them, but because they misunderstand where they actually come from.
Empty kilometers are often treated as a planning failure: poor routing, weak carrier discipline, or lack of optimization. In reality, they are more often a symptom of network design choices made far upstream from daily planning. The truck does not return empty because someone made a bad decision today. It returns empty because the system gave it no viable alternative yesterday.
In operational work across European corridors, RoadFreightCompany repeatedly encounters lanes where empty mileage is accepted as “normal,” even though volume exists nearby. The issue is not distance, but compatibility. Pickup times do not align. Equipment requirements differ slightly. Warehouse windows overlap poorly. On paper, a backhaul exists. In reality, it cannot be executed without breaking something else in the network.
Another driver is commitment timing. Capacity is often secured early to protect service, long before return options are clear. By the time the outbound move is confirmed, the truck is already operationally locked. Any potential backhaul that appears later is unusable. What looks like inefficiency is actually the cost of early certainty.
Commercial structures also play a role. Contracts tend to reward outbound performance and tolerate inbound waste. Rates are negotiated per lane, not per loop. This encourages optimization in one direction while quietly externalizing inefficiency in the other. RoadFreightCompany has seen networks where headline rates looked competitive, but total cost ballooned once empty repositioning was fully accounted for.
Technology has improved visibility but not alignment. Systems can show where trucks are, but they cannot force flows to match. Optimization engines work within the constraints they are given. If time windows, priorities, and commitments conflict, the result is mathematically optimal – and operationally empty.
Some organizations are beginning to reframe the problem. Instead of asking how to eliminate empty kilometers, they ask where they are being structurally produced. They look at pickup flexibility, equipment standardization, and commitment sequencing. They design flows in pairs rather than lanes. Where this happens, empty mileage often drops without any new tools or renegotiations.
The key insight is uncomfortable but useful: empty kilometers are rarely accidental. They are designed into the system through well-intentioned decisions made elsewhere. Reducing them sustainably requires less pressure on planners and more honesty about how networks are actually built.
In European road freight, where margins are thin and volatility is constant, understanding empty kilometers as a design outcome – not an execution failure – is one of the clearest ways to improve performance without increasing stress. Road Freight Company continues to see that the most efficient networks are not the ones that chase empties aggressively, but the ones that stop creating them in the first place.