One in Three Trucks You See on the Highway Is Empty

Next time you drive on a highway, try this exercise: count the trucks passing by. One… two… three. Statistically, one of those three is carrying absolutely nothing. A 40-foot trailer, a 500-horsepower engine, a professional driver — moving air.

Today we're telling the story of one of the biggest and most invisible inefficiencies in the modern economy — and giving you the mental model to find its cousins in your own business.

The 90-billion-mile hole

The numbers are hard to believe: according to industry surveys, between 15% and 35% of all truck miles in the US are driven empty (Inbound Logistics, 2023). Added up, that's over 90 billion empty miles a year — burning some 13.8 billion gallons of diesel and more than $30 billion in costs. Each individual truck loses between $27,000 and $55,000 a year moving air.

And here's the fascinating part: almost nobody sees it. The empty mile doesn't show up on any invoice, no alarm goes off, nobody reports it as a loss. It's the accepted cost of operating — until someone asks why.

It's not laziness. It's an information problem.

Why does a truck come back empty from Atlanta if there was surely SOMETHING to bring back? Because American freight is an ocean of fragmented actors: hundreds of thousands of carriers — most of them small, many single-truck — and millions of loads posted on different platforms, negotiated by phone, closed over text.

The return load almost always exists. What doesn't exist is someone who sees it in time. The operator who unloads at 4 PM would need to check five platforms, make ten calls and negotiate rates — while deciding whether to sleep there or head back. No human can orchestrate that search every day, for every truck, in real time.

And that sentence — no human can, at that scale — is precisely the definition of the problem that agent systems solve: perceive every source at once, reason about what chains with what, and act before the truck rolls out empty.

Play dispatcher

Three decisions. Let's see how many empty miles YOU leave on the table:

Did you catch the pattern? The difference between 0% and 40% empty miles was never the truck or the driver: it was how far you could see when deciding. Complete information = efficient system. It's the same lesson as the bottleneck, wearing 18 wheels.

The mental model: your own empty miles

Here's the unlock you take home — because this article was never just about trucks:

All idle capacity is an empty mile. Something you already paid for, moving without producing.

• The dead hour between appointments on your calendar: empty mile.
• The empty chair at the clinic at 3 PM because someone didn't show: empty mile.
• The software license you pay for that nobody opens: empty mile.
• Your team's senior talent doing data entry: the most expensive empty mile of all.

And the cause is always the same as on the highway: the demand exists, but the information doesn't flow in time toward the available capacity. That 3 PM gap would have been filled — if the system had offered the slot to the waitlist the moment it was canceled.

The question to take home

The logistics giants are already attacking their empty miles with algorithmic orchestration. The question this article wants to leave installed in you is more personal:

Where are the empty miles in your operation — and who is watching them?

Because they get paid for just like the trucks': silently, every day, without appearing on any invoice.

Sources and further exploring: FreightWaves — What you need to know about empty miles in trucking · Inbound Logistics, 2023 survey (up to 35% empty miles) · Industry estimates: ~90B empty miles/yr, ~13.8B gallons of diesel, $30B+ in costs · The game's routes are illustrative.