Truck routes: how to optimize them?

When transporting goods, road hauliers need to determine the best route for each round. Here are a few key principles to help you optimize your route planning.

Make every journey as profitable as possible

The cost of a journey is of course one of the main criteria taken into account when choosing a route, and will be based in particular on :

• Fuel consumption and mileage: to make each trip as profitable as possible, the aim is to keep the number of kilometers covered and the amount of fuel consumed to a minimum.
• Toll costs: the route planner must be able to estimate the total cost of tolls encountered on the chosen route, enabling you to anticipate this additional cost and recalculate the route if necessary.
• Load factor: avoiding empty returns is one of the challenges of road transport management.

Our advice for making your routes more profitable is to use freight exchanges. They enable you to optimize your routes by picking up loads that are located close to your planned itinerary. That's why we've set up partnerships with various freight exchanges and traceability solutions to enable our customers to view freight that could potentially be added to a tour directly in the Sinari TMS ready interface.

Anticipating traffic bans for heavy goods vehicles

When creating routes for road haulage, you need to take into account any traffic bans imposed on heavy goods vehicles. It would be very unfortunate if your drivers were to find themselves blocked by an impassable tunnel for their truck, or directed into areas to which their vehicle is not allowed access.

As a reminder, vehicles weighing over 3.5 t are banned from the entire road network from Saturday 10 pm to Sunday 10 pm and on public holidays (between 10 pm on the previous day and 10 pm on the public holiday).

There are also additional traffic bans. Heavy goods vehicles are prohibited from :

• in certain tunnels (due to the height of the vehicle or the transport of dangerous goods) ;
• due to permanent local bans for safety reasons;
• on certain motorway sections in the Ile-de-France region (article 3 of the order of March 2, 2015 relating to the ban on goods vehicles during certain periods);
• on certain Saturdays in the Rhône-Alpes region in winter, and on the entire road network on certain Saturdays in July and August (article 2 of the order of March 2, 2015 relating to the ban on the circulation of goods vehicles during certain periods);
• due to temporary bans for roadworks, for example, or for safety reasons in winter.

To optimize routes for your truck fleet, it's essential to use software that can guide you to the best routes, taking into account traffic bans.

Respect driving and rest times for each driver

To allocate routes to each driver, you must respect the driving and rest times (introduced by EC regulation no. 561/2006 of March 15, 2006).

For drivers of vehicles weighing over 3.5 t, the following must be taken into account:

• Daily driving time: 9 hours maximum (or 10 hours twice a week maximum). Drivers are limited to 4h30 of driving, with a 45 min break (or a break of 30 min + 15 min). Weekly driving time is 56 hours in a single week and 90 hours maximum in two consecutive weeks.
• Daily rest of 11 consecutive hours (divisible into 3h + 9h, maximum 3 times a week) and weekly rest of 45 hours.
• Compensatory rest: overtime worked by drivers entitles them to quarterly compensatory rest.

Use intuitive software like cartography

Mapping helps you visualize your itineraries and offers an intuitive approach to transport tracking. Artificial intelligence will automatically suggest a route, based on the criteria you provide. To manually refine the final itinerary, cartography lets you modify the route directly on a map.

Conclusion

Optimizing truck routes is more than just finding the shortest route: it's a balance between profitability, regulatory compliance and team organization. By taking into account costs (fuel, mileage, tolls), traffic bans, driving and rest times, and load factor, hauliers have concrete levers at their disposal to improve the efficiency of each route.

Digital tools play a decisive role here. Intuitive cartography, coupled with route calculators adapted to heavy goods vehicles and integration with freight exchanges, enable rapid arbitration and adjustment of routes according to local constraints. The result: more consistent routes, better mileage and more reliable operational management.

In the final analysis, optimizing routes means giving operators and drivers the means to work with greater precision, visibility and peace of mind, while improving overall business performance.