Route optimization is a term everyone in transport has heard, but most of what's written about it is about deliveries, not freight. In simple terms, it means choosing routes and loads so that a truck earns more on every kilometre it drives and runs empty as little as possible.
In delivery, optimizing a route means putting many small stops in the best order for a van working inside a city. For a carrier moving full loads, it covers decisions worth far more than the order of stops.
How route optimization works, from the single trip to the whole fleet
For a carrier, route optimization works trip by trip and across the whole fleet at the same time.
On a single trip, the question is the route. Between any two locations there is usually more than one possible route, and the best one is the one with the lowest total cost. Tolls change from road to road and from country to country, diesel prices change when you cross a border, and driving and rest time rules decide where the driver can stop, so the route that costs less in the end might be neither the shortest nor the fastest. Optimizing a trip means comparing the options in euros, for that truck, with that load, and picking the one that leaves the most margin.
When it comes to the fleet, the question becomes about which truck takes which load. When you give a load to a truck, you are also deciding where that truck will be tomorrow, and whether there will be freight for it there, or nothing but an empty drive. Optimizing at this level means matching trucks and loads across the whole fleet, several days ahead, so that trips connect and empty kilometres stay low.
A trip can look perfect on its own and still be the wrong choice, because it leaves the truck in a place with nothing to carry home, so carriers get more from optimizing the trip and the fleet together than from either one alone.
The costs of driving unoptimized routes
When nobody optimizes routes and assignments, the money leaks in different places:
- Empty kilometres, driven at full cost and earning nothing
- Fuel bought at the wrong price, on the wrong side of a border
- Tolls higher than they needed to be, because nobody compared the roads
- Trucks and drivers waiting, because the hours or the schedule didn't fit
- Loads turned down, when a truck was actually free to take them
The clearest cost is the empty kilometre. According to Eurostat, more than a fifth of the kilometres driven by road freight vehicles in the EU in 2024 (21.6%) were driven by empty trucks. An empty kilometre costs almost the same as a loaded one, because the truck burns a little less diesel without the weight but pays the same tolls, spends the same driver hours and wears the same tyres, and earns nothing while it does. The truck's fixed costs don't stop either, because the financing, the insurance and the driver's salary run whether there is freight on the trailer or not. When a better plan replaces an empty kilometre with a loaded one, the truck spends the same, but now there is extra revenue at the end of the trip.
Fuel is the second place the money shows. Diesel is one of the largest costs of running a truck, and on international routes its price changes at every border, so two drivers doing the same trip can hand in very different fuel bills depending on where each one filled the tank. Without a plan for fuel stops, the difference is invisible, because it hides inside a total that nobody breaks down per trip.
Tolls are another cost that depends on the route. Different roads to the same destination can carry very different toll prices, so a truck that always takes the usual road, without anyone checking the alternatives, can be paying more than it needs to on every trip. Over a year of repeated trips, that difference adds up to a lot of money.
And then there is time, which turns into money in less direct ways. A driver who runs out of legal driving hours an hour short of the delivery has to stop, so the truck waits, the customer waits, and the next trip starts late. Refusing work costs money too. When a customer asks for an extra trip and nobody knows if there is a free truck to take it, the answer is no. That refusal never shows up in any report, it is simply revenue that never arrived.
What the numbers say about optimizing routes
The strongest evidence that optimization pays sits inside the same Eurostat data. In 2024, around a quarter (25.8%) of the kilometres driven in national transport in the EU were empty, while in international transport the share was 12.6%. A big part of that difference is planning, because nobody sends a truck across Europe without thinking about what it will bring back, while a short national trip is easy to run on habit. Where the return gets planned, empty running falls by half.
For carriers in Portugal, the numbers carry extra weight, because Portuguese fleets do more long-distance work than almost anyone else in Europe. Trips of more than 1,000 kilometres account for 45.5% of all the tonne-kilometres Portuguese trucks move, one of the highest shares in the EU. The longer the trip, the more each decision about the road, the tolls and the diesel is worth.
How can a TMS help with route optimization
Doing these calculations by hand, for every trip and every truck, several days ahead, is not realistic, and for a carrier this work belongs in the TMS, the transport management system that already runs the operation. Optimization only works with real data, and the TMS is where the real data lives. It knows which trucks are free and where, which drivers have hours left, and which loads are waiting, so it can suggest the matches a person would need hours to find.
From there, the TMS optimizes each trip. It compares the possible routes in euros, with tolls and fuel included, it checks the driver's legal driving and rest times so it never assigns a trip the driver cannot finish, and it sends the result straight to the driver's app. When something changes during the day, a delayed loading or a cancelled trip, the plan gets rebuilt with the fleet as it is, and every truck and driver works from the updated version.
Want to see how Meight can help with your own trucks and routes? Book a call with one of our specialists today.
