Because commercial vehicles experience a city differently to commuters: different routes, different restrictions, multiple stops, loading and unloading. Every fleet manager and driver has an opinion on whether their area is getting faster or slower — this gives them, city planners, and journalists the evidence to back it up.

Two key things, for every city: 15-minute reach — how far a typical van or truck travels in a fixed 15 minutes on the road — and idling intensity — how much of a typical journey is spent stationary. Together they show whether a city is becoming more or less productive to operate a fleet in.

32 of the most economically important cities in Europe, across seven countries.

Every month.

Yes, free to use. It’s built for fleet operators, who can benchmark their city against every other major European market; city planners, who get an independent, ongoing read on the impact of policy; and journalists covering cities, logistics or sustain­ab­ility, who get a fresh, credible number to back up or build a story.

Trips are grouped into route families — bucketed by origin and destination, distance, traffic pattern and vehicle type — turning tens of thousands of individual trips into a manageable set of city archetypes. Each family must then pass two checks: it needs to appear consistently across working days and carry enough daily trip volume to be statistically meaningful.

No: it includes both journeys that begin and end within a city (we call these within-city trips) and trips that begin outside and enter a city (we call these inbound trips).

No. The panel of qualifying routes is fixed against a reference period and then held constant for every month scored within a delivery. A one-off trip or a blip in the raw feed can’t swing the number — a change from one month to the next reflects a real shift in traffic, not a change in what was being measured.

They’re held to a more lenient statistical bar than data-rich cities (which need 80 %+ working-day presence and 10+ trips per day), but that bar is still statistically defensible — designed so smaller cities can be included without publishing noise as if it were signal.

No, and that’s deliberate. Those measure general or consumer traffic. The Commercial Trip Monitor is built purely from fleet vans and trucks, and only analyses trips on routes repeatedly driven by commercial vehicles — so it reflects what fleet operators actually experience, which can move differently to overall congestion. An index showing congestion easing doesn’t necessarily mean conditions are improving for a business operating there.