Geotab, a global connected vehicle and asset management solutions provider, published its European Freight Efficiency Index titled ‘The Cost of Standing Still’, which found a 144% performance gap between Europe’s major cities.
London ranked sixth overall with a score of 29 out of 100, placing the UK capital among the lowest-performing cities in the Index alongside Paris (37) and Madrid (25).
Berlin ranked the highest with a score of 61 out of 100.
Amsterdam (59) is behind Berlin (61), nearly matching the city in terms of efficiency, while Dublin (49) and Rome (48) form a workable middle tier.
Geotab said the report uncovered that the same fleet, running the same vehicles, can experience fundamentally different realities depending on the city it operates in.
The same delivery route can take 20 minutes one day and 50 minutes the next, breaking schedules in ways that Rome or Paris, while more congested overall, often do not, according to Geotab.
Geotab said that what emerges from its first ‘European Freight Efficiency Index’ is a shift in how freight efficiency should be understood – away from day-to-day congestion and towards the infrastructure that shapes how cities move.
In Berlin, a polycentric layout distributes traffic across multiple routes, creating a flowing network that remains stable throughout the day.
In Amsterdam, compact design and signal optimisation keep vehicles moving – even at slow speeds – rather than queuing.
For fleets, unpredictability creates what Geotab said its data points to as a ‘structural tax’: extra buffer time, broken delivery windows and lost efficiency that cannot be solved through routing or driver training alone.
Rome, for example, combines high congestion with some of the lowest idling waste, as traffic flows in a continuous crawl rather than a stop-start pattern.
London, by contrast, sits at the opposite end – where repeated stopping and starting drives inefficiency, fuel waste and emissions.
Edward Kulperger, senior vice president at EMEA at Geotab, said: “Urban freight has always been seen through the lens of congestion – how busy a city is and how slow traffic becomes at peak times.
“What this Index shows is that the real issue runs deeper.
“It’s not just how much traffic there is, but how that traffic behaves.
“In the most efficient cities, movement is consistent and predictable.
“In the least efficient, it becomes fragmented – and that destruction has a direct impact on cost, emissions and the ability of fleets to operate effectively.
“For fleet operators, unpredictability is one of the most challenging factors to manage.
“You can plan for congestion, you can route around known delays, but when journey times vary significantly from one day to the next, it creates a compounding effect across the entire operation.
“What connected vehicle data allows us to do is make that hidden layer visible – to move beyond assumption and into real-world insight.
“That visibility is what enables fleets, cities and policymakers to make more informed decisions about how urban transport systems evolve.”
