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Why road freight efficiency is the hidden lever in supply chains
Road freight is often described as the backbone of European supply chains. It connects factories to warehouses, ports to distribution centres, and cities to consumers. Because of this central role, road transport is usually discussed in terms of visibility, capacity, or driver shortages. Yet these discussions often miss a more fundamental point: road freight efficiency, not just volume or visibility, is one of the most powerful and underused levers in European supply chains today.
Recent data from Eurostat (1) helps explain why.
At an aggregate level, the picture looks stable. Road freight transport in the EU has recovered from recent disruptions, with tonne-kilometre volumes showing modest year-on-year growth. Road remains, by far, the dominant inland transport mode. But these high-level figures conceal important structural differences in how road freight actually operates; differences that directly shape cost, emissions, and service reliability.
The key variable is distance.
Distance changes everything
Eurostat’s journey-characteristics data shows that the average distance per tonne in national road transport is around 97 km. For international road transport, the average exceeds 600 km, and rises further for cross-trade operations. These figures reveal something essential: European road freight is not a single operational system. It is a set of distinct transport realities layered on top of one another.
Short national hauls dominate in volume and frequency. They support store replenishment, factory feeding, regional distribution, and first- and last-mile port connections. Because distances are short, performance on these lanes is not primarily about transit speed. It is about synchronisation. Trucks must arrive within narrow time windows aligned with warehouse labour, dock availability, and yard capacity.
On a 97 km journey, a delay of 30 minutes is not marginal. It can trigger missed slots, driver waiting time, re-sequencing of loads, and knock-on disruption across an entire operating day. Efficiency on these lanes is measured in minutes, turns, and reliability, not kilometres.
Long-distance international road transport behaves very differently. With journeys averaging more than six times the length of national ones, the operational logic shifts from time precision to distance economics. Efficiency depends on load consolidation, route selection, fuel consumption, regulatory compliance, and the ability to absorb variability over longer transit times.
Delays still matter, but their meaning changes. A one-hour delay on a 600 km haul does not have the same immediate operational impact as it does on a short national run. However, when disruption occurs due to border congestion, weather, or regulatory friction; the financial and contractual consequences are often larger, affecting downstream modes and customer commitments.
Too often, these fundamentally different journeys are managed using the same KPIs and alert logic, thus flattening operational reality and obscuring where efficiency is truly gained or lost.
Empty running: A structural efficiency problem
The same structural divide appears when looking at empty running, one of the clearest indicators of road freight inefficiency.
In 2024, 21.6% of all road freight vehicle-kilometres in the EU were driven empty. These kilometres still consume fuel, labour, and infrastructure, while generating no transport output. More importantly, empty running is not evenly distributed. For national transport, empty running reaches nearly 26%, while for international transport it drops to around 13%.
This contrast is telling. The shortest, most frequent journeys, those embedded in regional supply chains are also the least efficient in terms of asset utilisation. This is rarely the result of poor execution on the day of transport. Instead, it reflects how networks are designed: fragmented demand, imbalanced lanes, and planning decisions that optimise individual legs rather than the system as a whole.
From a supply-chain perspective, empty running is often treated as a sustainability metric or a reporting statistic. In reality, it is a planning signal. High empty rates point to structural inefficiencies that directly affect cost, emissions, and capacity utilisation. Even small reductions in empty kilometres on high-frequency national lanes can unlock disproportionate gains.
Road freight efficiency as a supply-chain lever
Taken together, Eurostat’s journey-characteristics data leads to a clear conclusion: road freight efficiency cannot be improved through generic optimisation alone. Short-haul and long-haul road transport require different performance models, different intervention thresholds, and different planning assumptions.
Short national flows demand extreme coordination and time discipline. Long international flows demand economic optimisation and risk management across distance. Treating them as interchangeable creates blind spots that no amount of additional tracking can fully resolve.
This is why road freight efficiency remains a hidden lever. The biggest gains do not always come from moving faster or adding more data, but from aligning optimisation logic with journey structure: distance, frequency, and load efficiency.
Source: Eurostat, 2024. Road freight transport by journey characteristics.
Why a multimodal control tower is essential
Road freight does not operate in isolation. It connects ports, rail terminals, factories, and distribution centres, acting as the binding layer of multimodal supply chains. Because of this, inefficiencies on the road often amplify disruptions across other modes.
This is where a control tower for multimodal flows becomes critical. Not simply as a visibility layer, but as a decision layer, one that contextualises road freight performance within the broader network. By linking road data with ocean, rail, and air, control towers make it possible to distinguish between delays that matter and those that do not, and to anticipate how road-level inefficiencies will propagate across the supply chain.
Visibility remains important. Control towers, when designed around journey characteristics and multimodal dependencies, turn visibility into actionable insight.