It has been a difficult period for trucking. The American Transportation Research Institute’s latest report, released last month, puts the average cost of operating a truck in 2025 at $2.336 per mile, the highest in the report’s history. Diesel prices have been volatile; trade policy continues to shift, and carriers have had very little room to absorb another increase in cost.
These pressures are real, and understandably tend to dominate the conversation when the industry is under stress. But there’s another category of cost in freight that’s less visible, yet far more persistent.
Fuel prices will move, tariffs will change, and capacity will tighten and loosen. What doesn’t disappear with the cycle is the structural waste created by the way freight is planned and executed today.
Freight is inherently a network. No movement exists in isolation, and every movement affects where capacity is available and what can move next. The economics of one movement are connected to movements before and after it, across different shippers, carriers and facilities.
Yet most freight decisions are still made one load, one lane and one company at a time. A shipper plans around its own demand and service requirements. A carrier plans its fleet against only the loads and capacity it can see. Brokers and logistics providers do the same within the freight and capacity visible to them. Each participant can make a perfectly rational decision based on the information available, and the combined result can still be inefficient.
Empty miles are perhaps the clearest example. A truck completes a delivery, but the carrier’s next available load begins somewhere else. There may be suitable freight nearby, but it belongs to another shipper, sits within another network, becomes available at a different time, or is simply not visible when the decision is being made. So the truck moves empty.
We tend to call this a carrier problem because that’s where the empty miles show up. But the cost doesn’t stay with the carrier. It shows up in lower asset productivity, gets passed on to shippers through higher freight rates, and ultimately everyone across the supply chain pays for it.
Because the conditions that create that empty mile sit across multiple loads, shippers and facilities, no individual stakeholder can solve it alone.
The industry has spent years getting better at optimizing individual parts of this system. Transportation management system platforms, routing and fleet planning, and visibility have all improved. Load matching is faster and increasingly sophisticated.
All of that matters. But there’s a natural ceiling to how far one participant can optimize when the waste is being created between participants.
Consider two freight movements. One shipper has a load moving from Chicago to Atlanta. Another has freight leaving Atlanta shortly after that truck arrives. In separate planning systems, they’re unrelated transactions. Viewed together, they could form a continuous movement and keep the truck productive instead of repositioning empty.
Doing this once is simple. Doing it across millions of shipments, carriers, locations, appointment windows and operating constraints is not. The best decision for one load changes the options available for the next, and the picture keeps moving as freight, schedules and capacity change.
This is where artificial intelligence and computational technology become useful. They can work through a volume of interconnected decisions that can’t be managed manually, looking across freight and capacity to identify complementary movements and recalculating as conditions change.
A load can be optimized perfectly on its own and still leave a truck stranded at the destination, increasing costs for everyone. The opportunity lies in optimizing not just the load, but how loads work together.
High diesel prices make an empty mile more expensive. Weak freight markets make poor asset utilization more painful. Tariffs and geopolitical disruptions make planning harder, but they don’t create the underlying fragmentation. They expose it to a point where it can no longer be absorbed by the system.
When this freight cycle changes, that fragmentation will still be there. A truck running empty will still represent capacity that could have been productive, and freight will still be planned separately across shippers, carriers and logistics providers. Better market conditions may make that waste easier to absorb. They do not make it disappear.
There’s a broader point here about transportation cost. Savings have traditionally been approached as a negotiation problem: a better rate, a lower surcharge, a cheaper lane. Those levers matter, but negotiating who absorbs a cost is different from removing that cost from the system.
Reducing empty movements does the latter. Carriers get more productive use from the same assets, while shippers benefit from a more efficient underlying network. The value comes from removing waste rather than transferring margin from one participant to another.
The physical freight network has always been connected, but the decisions have largely remained disconnected. Technology is now making it possible to bridge that gap. And freight’s next cost breakthrough may come from getting the network to work better together.
Ajesh Kapoor is founder and chief executive officer of SemiCab.
