Diesel prices are hurting the logistics sector. The debate has fixated on excise cuts and fuel surcharges. But these are the wrong answers to the right question. The real challenge facing freight transport isn’t the price of diesel. It’s a deep, systemic dependency on it and a long-overdue productivity deficit that the industry can no longer afford to ignore.
A familiar reflex, a deepening problem
When diesel prices spike, the political reflex is predictable: industry lobbies for relief, governments weigh fuel duty cuts, and operators pass costs down the chain via surcharges. Dutch transport federation TLN has not ruled out excise reductions to ease pressure on carriers, while simultaneously pushing for broader short-term support. The underlying concern is legitimate. The mounting stack of costs, including wages, the new truck toll, and fuel, is becoming unsustainable for many operators.
But here is the inconvenient truth: subsidizing diesel doesn’t solve the problem. It postpones it, while quietly making it worse.
Trucks account for 40 to 50 percent of all diesel consumed in the Netherlands. That is not a footnote. It is a strategic vulnerability. And while policy discussions orbit around excise duties, something more serious is taking shape in the background: not just high prices, but potential scarcity. When supply runs short, no surcharge mechanism will compensate. As the IMF has recently warned, the issue is not just cost; there may simply not be enough energy to go around. The same constraint applies to electricity and grid capacity as demand for electrification accelerates.
When diesel is artificially kept cheap, through excise cuts or subsidies, it removes the financial pressure that would otherwise push companies to change their behavior. the urgency to reorganize, innovate, and reduce consumption. Excise relief gives operators breathing room, but it also gives them less reason to drive more efficiently, plan more intelligently, or invest in alternatives. It is a genuine dilemma, but one that tilts clearly in one direction when you take the long view.
This isn’t a sustainability problem. It’s a productivity problem.
The freight transport sector faces a convergence of pressures: rising energy costs, a worsening driver shortage, tightening climate targets, and increasing scarcity of land and infrastructure. By 2050, freight transport must be fully climate-neutral. Freight volumes, meanwhile, continue to grow toward 2030, driven by imports, transit flows, and expanding consumer and circular logistics.
The response cannot be to manage these pressures one at a time with targeted subsidies. The response has to be structural: doing significantly more with significantly less.
Economist Mathijs Bouman in FD puts it plainly: forget excise cuts: it is time to reduce energy demand. The sectors most exposed to diesel scarcity, labor shortages, and price volatility (agrifood, groceries, construction materials, containers, chemicals) are precisely those with the most to gain from smarter logistics. Fewer empty kilometers. Higher load factors. Fewer failed deliveries. Smarter networks with fewer links.
Recent research shows that better alignment between shippers and carriers can cut logistics costs per shipment by 20 to 40 percent. The Netherlands already has around 300 distribution hubs for urban logistics; the infrastructure is in place. The problem is that trucks arrive half-empty and leave empty. Many vehicles in the Netherlands cover fewer than 70,000 kilometers per year. That is too little to make electrification financially viable, and too little to justify the cost base that operators are already carrying. This is not a technology gap. It is an organizational gap.
Electrification is necessary but not sufficient
The Dutch truck toll, which is being introduced in three months, will add pressure, but its revenue recycling mechanism also creates a concrete financial incentive for operators to invest in cleaner, more efficient technology. Electrification is coming, and it is essential. But switching fuel types does not automatically make logistics smarter.
A half-empty electric truck is still a half-empty truck. The shift that matters is not from diesel engines to electric engines; it is from vehicle efficiency to system efficiency.
That means rethinking how freight moves at the network level: consolidating volumes, reducing delivery frequency where possible, sharing infrastructure, and building the data foundations that enable it all. Many trucks in the Netherlands simply do not drive enough kilometers per year for electrification to be economically viable. Better utilization is a precondition for a viable energy transition, not a nice-to-have alongside it.
Frontrunners show what is possible
The argument that system efficiency is unachievable does not survive contact with the companies already doing it.
Dutch CB Logistics has operated a consolidated book-delivery network for 160 years, achieving high load factors and low transport movements across a finely meshed national distribution system. Albert Heijn works with a select group of long-term transport partners, pooling volumes, deploying electric trucks, and sharing data; with costs and CO₂ emissions falling in tandem. Carrier Millenaar & Van Schaik operates as an embedded logistics partner in construction projects, bundling earthworks and materials flows into low-emission, circular construction logistics.
Measurement, too, is transformative. When Cornelissen Transport and Van der Wal applied a Logistics Performance Indicator across more than 9 million driven kilometers, they discovered that activity-driven routing was actually reducing vehicle utilization; the exact opposite of what management had assumed. The inefficiency was invisible until they measured it. In logistics, what gets measured gets fixed.
These are not isolated examples. They are proof of concept. The challenge is not whether system efficiency is achievable. The challenge is scaling what already works.
Why isn’t it happening faster?
Because genuine collaboration is uncomfortable. Operators value their autonomy. Sharing data with competitors (even in constrained, audited ways) feels risky. Trust between shippers and carriers is often shallow and transactional. And those who optimize within their own operations, without reference to the wider system, end up optimizing collectively at a suboptimal level. That is the structural trap the sector is in.
Digitalization and AI offer significant tools to surface these inefficiencies and support better decisions. But digital tools are only as good as the data underneath them. A business that cannot organize its own data cannot participate meaningfully in shared networks. The foundation has to be built before the superstructure can follow.
The sector’s working conference on logistics efficiency, held this week, identified five interconnected levers for acceleration: collaboration, digitalization, artificial intelligence, support for smaller operators, and behavioral change. None of these works in isolation. A sector that digitalizes without collaborating stays suboptimal. One that collaborates but leaves small operators behind lacks the systemic scale to drive real change.
What is actually needed
The answer is not simply “no subsidies.” Some temporary relief may be unavoidable as the sector navigates an acute cost crisis. But relief without conditions is a dead end.
What is needed is a sector-wide action plan with a genuine commitment between shippers, carriers, and government built around measurable targets: efficiency gains per tonne-kilometer, reduction in diesel dependency, and a concrete investment roadmap for alternatives. The revenue recycling mechanism attached to the truck toll offers exactly the kind of structured incentive that could anchor such a plan, directing funds toward operators who demonstrate real productivity gains rather than simply compensating those who maintain the status quo.
The government has a legitimate role here. But that role is not to muffle price signals that, uncomfortable as they are, do important work. The role of government is to accelerate the transition by setting standards, rewarding innovation, and creating the conditions for the sector’s frontrunners to demonstrate that sustainable logistics and profitable logistics are one and the same.
The consumer ultimately pays for logistics inefficiency, as they ultimately pay for high fuel costs. The long-term answer is the same in both cases: a system that needs less fuel because it wastes less energy.
2050 does not start in 2049. The sector is at a tipping point today. The question is no longer whether to change. Rising costs, tightening regulations and instituons, and energy scarcity are answering that question regardless. The question is who takes the initiative, and whether the policy environment rewards those who do.
Walther Ploos van Amstel