Unused miles are a loss of earnings, rather than something that simply happens in the business of moving goods. The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) estimates that one in six miles driven by a truck is empty – that is, 15% to 20% of all miles driven. Most of those empty miles are unnecessary. This shouldn’t be happening if you have the correct strategies in place.
If your fleet is running overlapping routes, sending drivers back to the depot empty, or assigning jobs based on habit rather than proximity, you’re paying for inefficiency every single day. Here’s how to fix it.
Switch From Static To Dynamic Route Optimization
The most common cause of route overlap is simple: someone drew up a plan a while back, it mostly worked, and nobody’s touched it since. The trouble is that a static map has no way of accounting for the order volumes you’re seeing now, the seasonal peaks you’ve picked up, or the two drivers you hired after the last reshuffle who’ve quietly been covering the same suburb on alternate days without anyone noticing.
Dynamic routing fixes this by working from what’s actually true today – live traffic, confirmed delivery windows, what each vehicle is carrying when it leaves the yard – rather than what was roughly true six months ago. There’s a reason this is a software problem rather than a dispatcher problem. The Travelling Salesman Problem, which is essentially what you’re solving every time you try to sequence a multi-stop route, gets computationally brutal very quickly. Add a few dozen extra roads and a few hundred customers into the mix and the number of possible route combinations becomes essentially uncountable. A good routing algorithm chews through all of that in seconds and hands your drivers territories that don’t step on each other.
Automate Dispatch To Remove Territorial Overlap
Spreadsheet dispatching intractably leaves the legwork of compatibility with other territories and current orders in the hands of a human, all but ensuring that one or two of your drivers are doing the same thing at the same time. By contrast, Courier management software makes those calculations as jobs come in and drivers become available, ensuring that everyone’s time is productive and any overlap is by design rather than oversight.
The operational gains compound over time. Once your dispatch system has accumulated data on order patterns, driver performance, and delivery windows, it can begin predicting where demand will cluster before the shift even starts – pre-assigning territories rather than reacting to them. That shift from reactive to proactive dispatch is where the real efficiency lives. Instead of resolving conflicts after they’ve already cost you fuel and time, your system is quietly preventing them from forming in the first place.
Build ABackhaul Strategy Before Trucks Leave The Depot
An empty truck returning after making a delivery isn’t just idle, it’s consuming fuel for no gain. Backhauling refers to finding return loads for trucks so they can transport goods in both directions.
You don’t necessarily need a full-service freight broker to do this. Many of your customers will have shippers whose locations are conveniently located on popular return lanes. Identify those and then use digital freight platform to find additional loads wherever needed. The important thing to remember is to consider the return route as a paid trip, not a wasted one. Even partially filled return loads boost your capacity use and lower the fuel cost for every paid mile.
Consolidate LTL Shipments By Zone
The last part of the delivery is the most harmful part of the routes. If three drivers have two to three LTL parcels each going to the same postal code, then you have duplicate deliveries.
The hub-and-spoke consolidation model solves this by having one vehicle make a run for all shipments going to a specific zone. Shipments are delivered to a central hub. There, they are sorted by delivery zone, and the delivery routes do not interact with each other. The minor added time for pre-sorting is far less than the fuel and labor costs for duplicate deliveries. Geofencing can help with this by identifying when two drivers are working in the same geographically defined area and alerting management to look into this to prevent it from becoming a habit.
Use Telematics For Real-Time Rerouting Decisions
Most people think of GPS tracking as a way to keep an eye on speeds and make sure drivers aren’t taking long lunches. It’s actually far more useful than that. When a new pickup lands mid-shift, a quick look at your telematics dashboard will show you which driver is already nearby and has room in the van – meaning you can assign it to them on the spot rather than pulling someone off the depot.
That’s where the real value is. Route plans made at 7am rarely survive contact with the actual day, and by mid-morning things have usually shifted enough that you’re working from a plan that no longer reflects reality. Telematics gives your dispatchers the live picture they need to make adjustments as things change – catching a potential deadhead trip before it happens, not writing it up in a report the next day.
Track Capacity Utilization As ALeading Indicator
Many fleet managers monitor fuel costs and the delivery of goods on time. But fewer keep an eye on the use of capacity per route, where the early indicators of waste begin to appear.
If a vehicle consistently travels at 40% full on a given route, that is not a driver problem – it is a routing problem. Low use tells you that the route was designed too small, or that there are nearby consolidation opportunities being overlooked. Check the use by route weekly. Whenever you identify a consistent shortage, you can be pretty sure it signals that two routes can be combined, that a zone boundary can be changed, or that a backhaul opportunity is slipping through your fingers.
Deadhead miles and routes that overlap aren’t just random waste. They are what your planning system produces when it is overwhelmed by the scale and pace of modern fleet logistics. The solution isn’t to work harder with your whiteboard. It’s time to think about a new planning and optimization tool that is designed to make the right decision the easy decision.