Commercial vehicles outperform passenger cars in terms of urban road efficiency in five European capitals, a new study by Geotab has revealed.
Geotab’s European Urban Freight Efficiency Index, which gathered data on truck and passenger vehicle performance in Berlin, Amsterdam, Dublin, Rome, Paris, London and Madrid, scored each city’s performance on a scale of 0 to 100, based on how freely traffic moves and the fuel lost through idling.
In countries where trucks outperform passenger vehicles, Geotab said that this may reflect operating practices such as off-peak scheduling and efforts to reduce exposure to periods of heavy congestion.
Performance gap
As it found, the biggest performance gap between commercial vehicles and passenger cars was recorded in Rome, where trucks scored 63, compared with 37 for passenger vehicles – a 26-point gap.
In Berlin, this performance gap stood at 16 points – with trucks scoring 71 and passenger cars scoring 55 – while Dublin and Amsterdam recorded advantages of 14 and 10 points respectively. Paris, which recorded the highest truck idle rate in the study, also scored higher for trucks (46) than passenger cars (31).
London bucked the trend, however, with passenger vehicles outperforming trucks by a two-point margin. According to Geotab, this reflects a regulatory environment that ‘weighs particularly heavily on commercial vehicles’, including bus lane and loading restrictions and emissions zone requirements.
In Madrid, the performance gap was six points in favour of passenger cars – passenger score 28, truck score 22 – however the daily traffic conditions for both sets of vehicles means operators face ‘not just permanent congestion but conditions that are genuinely unpredictable’, as Geotab noted.
Urban road inefficiency
“The assumption that trucks are always the primary source of urban road inefficiency doesn’t hold up in this data,” commented Edward Kulperger, senior vice president, EMEA at Geotab.
“In most European cities, professional fleet operations outperform general passenger traffic by a significant margin; the product of structured routing, better scheduling, and data-driven decisions that private drivers simply don’t have access to. For operators in every city, the message is the same: the clearer your picture of where the costs are falling, the better placed you are to do something about it.” Read more here.
