Executive Summary
Foreword
Introduction
Rankings
Two Pillars
Safety
Fleet Management
City Snapshots
What This Means
Outlook
Methodology
The safety dimension
Two cities diverge from the pattern. Paris is the most dangerous city per trip despite a mid-table efficiency score — 78.5% of all harsh events are harsh accelerations. Drivers apply maximum throttle habitually from every standstill. High efficiency and high harm can coexist when driver behaviour, not road design, is the primary cause. London is anomalously safe relative to its low efficiency score (29). Despite the second-highest absolute event volume in the study, its per-trip rate of 462 is less than half of Madrid’s. Congestion charging, active enforcement, and lower aggression norms compensate for poor infrastructure. London’s safety record is a policy achievement as much as a network design achievement. Rome reinforces the point: some of the worst congestion in the study, just 393 harsh events per 1,000 trips. Slow-but- flowing traffic is safer than stop-and-start gridlock. Where harsh events cluster matters as much as how many. Amsterdam: 13.7% of all city events concentrate at the Schiphol motorway interchange (a solvable, infrastructure- specific problem). Dublin: the N7/Naas Road generates 71% of cornering events in its top hotspot cell. Paris: the Périphérique forces constant merge-and-weave with no policy mitigation. Berlin: hotspots dispersed across western districts — distributed demand, no single bottleneck. City-normalised benchmarking separates driver behaviour from road conditions. A driver generating 1,000 harsh events per 1,000 trips is at the city average in Madrid and well above it in Berlin. Performance targets should reflect the network your drivers operate in.
Using GPS-derived harsh driving event data (harsh acceleration, harsh braking, and harsh cornering) from Geotab connected vehicles in 2025, the pattern is consistent across all seven cities: efficient road networks produce safer driving conditions. Cities with higher efficiency scores generate fewer harsh events per trip:
Score City
Events per 1,000 trips
225
61 Berlin
315
49 Dublin
356
59 Amsterdam
“The road network structures when vehicles stop, how they accelerate, what the merge conditions look like at every junction. That’s why efficiency scores and harsh event rates track together in five of the seven cities. City-normalised benchmarking lets operators separate driver behaviour from infrastructure. A driver’s harsh event rate only means something when you know the city they’re operating in.”
393
48 Rome
462
29 London
1,088
25 Madrid
Abhinav Vasu AVP Solutions Engineering EMEA, Geotab
1,191
37 Paris
The gap between Berlin (225) and Paris (1,191) is 5.3x. Between Berlin and Madrid: 4.8x.
European Urban Freight Efficiency Index 10
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