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Road-transport.org, the knowledge consolidation centre for everything related to trucks and buses.
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All data and contents shared here try to be as correct as possible. Bear in mind that that it reflects what I understood from the road freight industry, and corrections are happening all the time to reflect my growing knowledge and know-how. About the author.
Road transport refers to all forms of transportation that occur on roads, complementing other transport modes such as water (maritime, inland shipping, nearshoring), air (aviation), and rail. It primarily consists of cars, vans, lorries, and buses, which share the roads with micro-mobility vehicles such as bikes. More often than not, all modes are used in collaboration (intermodal) in cargo or passenger journeys, as a road vehicle is generally used to power the first and last miles of such trips.
Transportation fulfills the essential need to move people and goods, powering trade and physical exchanges. If transportation is the industry in charge of displacing people and cargo, road transport is the sub-industry considering only movements on roads. Cars and buses are the tools of road transport to move people while vans and trucks are the tools to move cargo.
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Trucks are tools to move cargo or tools following roads. Buses are tools to move passengers following roads
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Trucks and buses are then answering a transport need, generally expressed by logistics for goods and by people themselves (mobility). Logistics is the part of supply chain management that deals with the efficient forward and reverse flow of goods, services, and related information from the point of origin to the point of consumption according to the needs of customers. Supply chain management (SCM) deals with a system of procurement (purchasing raw materials/components), operations management, logistics, and marketing channels through which raw materials can be developed into finished products and delivered to their end customers.
Trucks are used to move goods, and several metrics can be used to track their overall performance: tonne-kilometres (t.km), vehicle-kilometres (v.km), and tonnes loaded.
Tonnes-kilometres is the KPI closest to an energy, as tonnes can be linked to weight (tonnes × gravity), and weight × distance is a force times a distance, or work in physics, which is energy. Looking at tonnes-kilometres therefore gives a view of the intensity of road transport and the energy mobilised to move goods. In a way, this KPI is also reflecting the costs injected into road transport, as fuel (energy) is a large part of the vehicles operating costs.
Source: EUROSTAT road_go_tq_tott, extracted the 03-03-2026
Vehicles-kilometres is the most natural KPI and the easiest to grasp, as it is closest to a single mileage figure. It is the cumulative mileage covered by the fleet. 100 v.km equals 100 kilometres driven by one truck, or 50 kilometres driven by two trucks (or one truck driving 40 and the other driving 60). This KPI complements the tonnes-kilometres one, as it considers empty miles, or the mileage that trucks run empty. Such empty miles equal 0 t.km by definition. Moreover, v.km can help analyse t.km, indicating whether any growth is linked to an increase in tonnage or trip distances.