EU transport grows as fuel increases pressure on freight rates

Today's article discusses fuel pressure on freight rates, so we checked what the industry itself has been saying about it in recent days: freight forwarders and carriers in Polish Facebook groups, logistics managers on LinkedIn and, from a somewhat longer-term perspective, Wykop users. The picture that emerges is consistent: rates on freight exchanges are barely keeping up with costs, while Europe's logistics giants have their own separate problems.

Rates on the road: how much is really being paid per kilometre

Yesterday, 13 September, a short but specific comment on freight exchange rate levels appeared in the Polish Facebook group Transport Spedycja Logistyka, beneath a transport job posting: "The average from the freight exchange last week was PLN 6.5 per km😉" - wrote Pan Damian. The day before, the author of the same thread, Tomasz Tomasz, advertised direct domestic work at even lower rates: "DOMESTIC WORK 13.6 curtainsider std rates 4.6 - 5.25 per km 2300/2200 km per week. NIP - 6860000126 +48783600631. we don't use a freight exchange, work direct from the source :)" The difference between the freight exchange rate and the "direct from the source" rate - more than one zloty per kilometre - is precisely the margin over which carriers and freight forwarders have been waging a quiet war for months.

Empty runs come at a cost: DKV joins forces with Timocom

The subject of empty runs and energy costs returned on LinkedIn thanks to Sebastian Klauke, who announced the integration of the DKV platform with the Timocom freight exchange: "Most of our 450.000 customers are small and medium-sized companies. Two of their most common challenges: Energy costs and empty runs." The post quickly received 190 likes, and TIMOCOM itself responded in the comments: "Great to see this partnership taking shape. By connecting DKV directly with the TIMOCOM Road Freight Marketplace, we're making it easier for transport companies to find suitable freight, reduce empty runs and use available capacity more efficiently." According to Klauke, at least one-fifth of truck journeys in Europe take place without a load - it is precisely this "empty run" that drives up the actual diesel cost on the carrier's invoice.

Road tolls down, paperwork up: the Netherlands and Spain change the rules

At the same time, the industry was commenting on two regulatory changes. Uniserve noted that the Dutch kilometre-based road toll is temporarily reduced from 1 September to 31 December 2026: "From 1 September to 31 December 2026, toll rates are reduced by 22.3% across all applicable trucks, providing short-term relief to transport operators facing higher fuel costs." At the same time, Lucien Besse reported the end of paper CMRs in Spain: "Paper CMRs are becoming a thing of the past." - from 5 October 2026, Spain's digital transport document DeCA will become mandatory. The fuel-cost background to these changes is telling: the average diesel price in the EU rose from EUR 1.56 to EUR 1.96 per litre between the end of 2025 and the end of Q1 2026, an increase of 26 percent, according to an analysis by autonomosenruta.com, while professional-use diesel in France rose by as much as 42.7 percent from February 2026, as reported by franceroutes.fr. In Poland, meanwhile, the full 23-percent VAT rate on fuel returned on 1 July 2026 after the "Lower Fuel Prices" programme ended, resulting in an overnight increase of PLN 0.80-0.90 per litre, as described by etransport.pl.

DSV versus Schenker: a merger that still hurts road transport

The week's most widely discussed LinkedIn topic (587 likes, 39 comments) was a post about Schenker's integration with DSV, published on the Supply Chain Europe profile, pointing out that "biggest headaches lie in road transport" - because the road network is to be consolidated from around 400 terminals to 270. In the comments, industry professionals broke the issue down into its component parts. Geert Leroy drew attention to the staffing aspect: "Integration of 2 companies also means slimming down on staff as each company has their own HR, IT, Legal, Operations, BD heads". Raoul Gelmers went further and pointed to the difference in organisational cultures: "Schenker has always felt quite personal in the way they work with customers, while DSV seems much more driven by scale, standardisation, efficiency and price discipline."

The crisis from months ago is still reverberating (Wykop, February-May 2026)

Older but still relevant background threads on Wykop show that the current cost pressure is a continuation of problems that have been visible for months. In a thread about the crisis in the transport industry from 28 May 2026, user bemo wrote: "I run a freight forwarding business myself - today there are few carriers - yes, but there are only a handful of offers", suggesting that despite reports of waves of bankruptcies, the market is not unambiguously bad for freight forwarders. In a February (22 February 2026) thread about working as a freight forwarder, user PfefferWerfer described the realities of the job bluntly: "This job will chew you up and spit you out like rubbish. On the phone 24/7, arguments with drivers, shippers and supervisors over things beyond your control."

The day's sentiment

Industry sentiment is ambivalent but consistent. Freight forwarders and carriers on Facebook are haggling over individual groszy per kilometre, while the difference between the freight exchange rate and "direct from the source" work shows how thin margins are today. On LinkedIn, major players (DKV, Timocom, DSV, Uniserve) speak openly about empty runs and energy costs as the sector's main pain points, while the DSV–Schenker merger is prompting more concern about organisational culture and jobs than enthusiasm. In the background, viewed over a period of months, there is also clear fatigue with the freight-forwarding profession and scepticism about media reports of the "collapse of the industry". Taken together, this paints a picture of a market that is growing in volume but is finding it increasingly difficult to translate that growth into real margins.

Sources unavailable today: Hacker News (no relevant hits on freight forwarding/TSL in recent days), YouTube (the videos found about fuel prices focused mainly on the North American market or games, with no substantive comments on European rates), EU driver forums - trucker-forum.at, forotransportistas.es, forum.soferdetir.ro, planet-truck.fr (the search engine did not provide access to the content of specific threads, only press articles).