Geotab has published its first European Freight Efficiency Index to benchmark how efficiently commercial vehicles move through seven major European capitals.

The Cost of Standing Still report reveals 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.

The report, which includes vans and light-duty commercial vehicles as well as HGVs, 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 report also uncovers a shift in how freight efficiency should be understood – away from day-to-day congestion and towards the infrastructure that shapes how cities move.

Infrastructure is shown to be important. 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 it’s only part of the picture and Geotab says that the way in which fleets plan, schedule and adapt to the network they operate in is equally consequential.

Cities such as London, Paris and Madrid show 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.

The data shows that 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 that the real issue of congestion for urban freight runs deeper than just how busy a city is and how slow traffic becomes at peak times.

“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.”

Geotab’s The Cost of Standing Still report is online here.