What does a $2.336 mile actually measure?

On July 15, ATRI published its annual analysis of trucking operating costs. The headline number is $2.336 - the average cost to run a truck for one mile in 2025. It is the highest in the report's history, and it will show up in every rate conversation over the next few months.

The number I kept coming back to wasn't the cost. It was 16.5 percent: the share of miles the trucks in the study ran empty. Not because the figure surprised me, but because it made me wonder what that statistic was really measuring.

1: Whose metric is it

Every benchmark answers a specific question. Reading ATRI's report, I found myself wondering whether there was a different question underneath it. An empty mile is reported as a carrier metric, but it is rarely created by a carrier alone. More often, it is the outcome of decisions made across shippers, carriers, brokers and planning systems that never see one another.

2: The rational empty mile

A carrier delivers a load. The next available shipment belongs to a different shipper, sits in a different planning system, and runs on a schedule the carrier cannot afford to wait for. Waiting might serve the network. It would damage that carrier's own utilization. So the truck repositions and keeps moving, which is the right call for that business on that day. Multiply that decision across thousands of companies, every day, and the industry produces millions of empty miles that no one intended and no single participant could have prevented.

The report hints at this dynamic. It notes that deadhead rises in weaker freight markets as fleets chase whatever viable freight is available. That is exactly what a well-run carrier should do. Optimizing your own business and optimizing the network you operate within are not the same exercise.

3: Loaded miles, not all miles

That distinction changes how I read the headline number. The $2.336 covers every mile a truck travels, loaded or empty. At the reported level of empty mileage, that translates to an effective cost of about $2.80 for every loaded mile. If empty mileage is closer to 30 percent, the same operating cost becomes roughly $3.34 per loaded mile. I do not see those as competing figures. One tells us what it costs to operate an asset. The other starts to tell us what it costs to move freight. Neither tells us whether the network around that truck was working.

4: Inside the walls

For decades the industry has gotten very good at optimizing and measuring inside its own walls. Carriers benchmark cost per mile, fuel economy, driver utilization, asset productivity. Shippers optimize procurement, routing guides and lane performance. Every participant has gotten better at running the part of the system it controls. Empty miles persist anyway, which suggests the inefficiency that remains no longer sits inside individual companies. It sits between them.

5: What we don't measure

That is what I took from this year's report. We have become precise at measuring the performance of companies, and we still have very few ways to measure the performance of the network those companies create together.

The way forward

We have spent decades learning how to benchmark carriers. What would change if we became equally good at benchmarking networks? If the next real gains in freight come from a better-connected system rather than better individual companies, the metrics that define the next decade may not belong to any one company at all.

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