Executive Summary
Foreword
Introduction
Rankings
Two Pillars
Safety
Fleet Management
City Snapshots
What This Means
Outlook
Methodology
What this means for you
For fleet operators
For city planners
For drivers
For policymakers
The data shows that operational structure — routing discipline, delivery scheduling, freight-specific strategies — measurably outperforms less structured approaches, even when the same connected vehicle technology is in place. A fleet running on-time in London is achieving something structurally different from one doing the same in Berlin — the road network is a fundamentally different constraint. Cities with high variability (London, Madrid) reward operational flexibility — wider delivery windows, near-real-time routing, the ability to adapt. Cities that are congested but predictable (Rome, Paris) reward scheduling
The data makes clear where the primary lever is: congestion management, not individual vehicle behaviour. The cities that score highest have invested in distributing traffic load (polycentric layouts, wider arterials, coordinated signal networks). That structural difference explains far more of the variation between cities than anything fleets do with their own vehicles. Connected vehicle data makes it possible to measure infrastructure performance continuously and objectively — not just at the point of investment, but over time, against a comparable baseline across cities.
The city shapes the data more than most benchmark systems acknowledge. A driver averaging 900 harsh events per 1,000 trips in Madrid is performing at the city average. The same rate in Berlin would be four times above it. Most variation in harsh event data comes from the road network, not the driver — and that has consequences for how performance data is read and how improvement targets are set.
The interventions that made Berlin and Amsterdam perform well (distributed road networks, coordinated signal timing, designated freight infrastructure) are not unknowns. The harder question is whether cities will invest at scale, and whether they will have access to objective, continuous measurement of what is working. This Index provides one part of that foundation. The scale of what is structurally possible is significant. If all seven cities matched Berlin’s efficiency score, the collective improvement across the region would be 39% (reduced congestion, lower emissions and more reliable journey times).
discipline — congestion is severe, but consistent enough to plan around.
European Urban Freight Efficiency Index 19
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