The cost of standing still: Berlin leads Europe for freight efficiency as London and Madrid lag behind

Geotab's new data Index reveals major performance gaps between Europe's capital cities

LONDON, May 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Geotab, a global leader in connected vehicle and asset management solutions, today published its first European Freight Efficiency Index titled "The Cost of Standing Still" revealing a 144% performance gap between Europe's major cities with Berlin ranking highest in freight efficiency. London ranks sixth overall with a score of just 29 out of 100, placing the UK capital among the lowest-performing cities in the Index alongside Paris (37) and Madrid (25). Amsterdam (59) trails just behind Berlin (61), nearly matching the city in terms of efficiency, while Dublin (49) and Rome (48) form a workable middle tier.

Every day, millions of vehicles move through Europe's cities carrying the things that keep economies alive - food, medicine, materials and parcels. But not all cities move them equally. The Geotab report uncovers that the same fleet, running the same vehicles, can experience fundamentally different realities depending on the city it operates in - with wide-reaching consequences for cost, emissions and performance.

At one end, Berlin leads the Index with a score of 61, where traffic remains manageable and, crucially, predictable. At the other, Madrid ranks last with a score of 25, creating a 144% efficiency gap between the best and worst-performing cities - a stark difference that translates directly into time, fuel and operational cost.

For the UK, London emerges as one of the most operationally complex environments in the Geotab Index, ranking sixth overall with a score of 29. While the capital remains heavily congested, the real challenge lies in the inability to reliably plan around it. 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. For fleet operators, this makes wider delivery windows, dynamic routing and operational flexibility increasingly critical.

The real story: the road shapes performance but operations determine the gap

What emerges from Geotab's 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.

But infrastructure is only part of the picture. How fleets plan, schedule and adapt to the network they operate in is equally consequential. Cities like London, Paris and Madrid reveal that congestion alone is not the defining issue - unpredictability is. And for fleets, that unpredictability creates what the Geotab 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.

At a fundamental, and perhaps counterintuitive level, cities that move slowly can still be efficient, if they keep moving.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, 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."

Read the full report here.

Methodology

The European Urban Freight Efficiency Index scores each city on a scale of 0 to 100, based on two dimensions evaluated separately for passenger vehicles and trucks, then combined using a 60/40 weighting (passenger/truck) to reflect that most road demand comes from passenger vehicles while the truck component captures logistics efficiency specifically.

The first dimension, how traffic flows, accounts for 75% of each vehicle score and measures three things: congestion burden (cumulative congestion across the day, 50% weight), uncongested windows (hours per day of free-flowing traffic, 25% weight), and travel time variability (journey time predictability, 25% weight).

The second dimension, what congestion costs, accounts for the remaining 25%, measuring mid-trip vehicle idling as a proxy for waste produced by the system. Higher idle ratios indicate congestion, poor signal timing and bottlenecks.

Idle fuel costs were estimated using 2025 average pump prices from the European Commission's Weekly Oil Bulletin for EU cities, and the UK Government's Weekly Road Fuel Prices dataset for London, converted at the 2025 average GBP/EUR rate.

All scores are based on full-year 2025 data (January–December) from Geotab's connected vehicle platform across seven cities: Berlin, Amsterdam, Dublin, Rome, Paris, London and Madrid. Scores represent normalised, relative comparisons from a sample of connected vehicles, not a census.

About Geotab
Geotab is a global leader in connected vehicle and asset management solutions, with headquarters in Oakville, Ontario and Atlanta, Georgia. Our mission is to make the world safer, more efficient, and sustainable. We leverage advanced data analytics and AI to transform fleet performance and operations, reducing cost and driving efficiency. Backed by top data scientists and engineers, we serve approximately 100,000 global customers, processing 100 billion data points daily from more than 5 million vehicle subscriptions. Geotab is trusted by Fortune 500 organisations, mid-sized fleets, and the largest public sector fleets in the world, including the US Federal government. Committed to data security and privacy, we hold FIPS 140-3 and FedRAMP authorisations. Our open platform, ecosystem of outstanding partners, and Geotab Marketplace deliver hundreds of fleet-ready third-party solutions. This year, we're celebrating 25 years of innovation. Learn more at www.geotab.com/uk and follow us on LinkedIn or visit our blog.

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Media contact: Romina Dashghachian, Strategic Communications Lead EMEA, Geotab, pr@geotab.com