Parasitic kilometres: the ones you pay for twice

The truck covered 1,340 km on a trip planned at 1,190. The freight arrived on
time, the customer is happy, the invoice is out. Nobody asks about the extra 150
kilometres, because nobody has anything to show. They dissolve into the monthly
consumption, into the fuel receipts, into the per-truck average.

Those are parasitic kilometres. And from 1 October 2026 they cost twice.

What parasitic kilometres are, and why nobody sees them

A parasitic kilometre is one driven outside the planned route with no explanation
attached. Not the detour around a closed road. Not the diversion a customer
asked for. Not the run to the fuel station or the overnight parking. Those are
extra kilometres with a reason, and the reason is written down somewhere.

The parasitic kilometre is what is left. What remains once you have subtracted
everything that explains itself.

The reason nobody sees them is simpler than it looks: to see them you need two
things in the same place — a planned route, saved before departure, and the real
GPS trace from afterwards. Most companies have the second. Few have the first,
saved, on every trip. Without it there is nothing to compare against, so the
question never gets asked.

This is where it differs from empty running. For empty kilometres there is
European statistics. For parasitic kilometres there is none — not because there
are few of them, but because almost nobody measures them. A company that does not
compare the plan against the GPS trace does not have a high parasitic percentage.
It has no percentage at all.

Where you stand, before we talk money

On empty running you do have something to compare against. Eurostat, 2024, share
of vehicle-kilometres run empty:

The gap between national and international is no surprise: on the big corridors
you find return freight, on domestic work you come back empty more often.

Romania moved 67 billion tonne-kilometres in 2024, out of an EU total of 1,869
billion. A large market on thin margins — exactly the kind where one percentage
point matters.

Why they get more expensive under per-kilometre tolling

Until now a 40 km detour cost you diesel only. The vignette was paid annually
whatever distance you covered; the detour hid inside it.

TollRo changes that. The charge is per kilometre driven, differentiated by road
category, maximum authorised mass, number of axles and emission class, for
vehicles over 3.5 t. The legal frame is Law 226/2023, transposing EU Directive
2022/362.

The dates, as CNAIR has clarified them: 31 August 2026 is the deadline for
implementing the STRR and TollRo infrastructure, while the tariffs themselves
start being charged on 1 October 2026. You have a month.

Published tariffs for the national road network, in lei per kilometre:

The range is set by emission class — Euro VI is cheapest. Lei tariffs are
adjusted annually for inflation. Payment is by route ticket, through CNAIR’s
eTarife app, or through SETRo with on-board equipment.

Concretely: a tractor unit running 8,000 km a month inside Romania, mostly on
motorway, faces 3,840 – 4,960 lei a month in domestic toll alone, depending on
emission class. The gap between Euro VI and Euro III on motorway is close to 30%
per kilometre. If your trucks’ technical data is wrong in the provider’s system,
you pay that difference for nothing.

And the consequence that runs through the rest of this article: every parasitic
kilometre is now paid for twice — once in diesel, once in toll.

The dates and tariffs above come from the economic press. Confirm them with
CNAIR before putting them in a budget.

What it costs on your fleet

We are not going to hand you a savings percentage. Put your own figures in and
see what comes out — including when it comes out badly.

cost/km       = consumption / 100 * diesel price + road toll
fleet km/yr   = trucks * km/month * 12
parasitic km  = fleet km * % parasitic
empty km      = fleet km * % empty
km recovered  = parasitic km * % cut + empty km * % cut
gross saving  = km recovered * cost/km
platform cost = trucks * price/truck * 12
net gain      = gross saving - platform cost
break-even    = platform cost / cost/km / trucks / 12

The number worth looking at is not the gross saving but the break-even: how many
recovered kilometres per truck per month cover the platform cost entirely. That
one does not depend on any optimistic assumption about how much you cut. It is a
division.

Step 1 — the route is calculated before departure

Every transport order gets a route calculated with a professional routing engine
(PTV), across the trip’s real points: Point 0, the loading points, the unloading
points.

The result is not just a line on a map. It is the estimated kilometres and
the toll reference for that route — a cost estimate before anyone starts the
engine. When you quote, you quote against a figure rather than a memory.

Point 0 is where the truck actually departs from: wherever the previous trip
ended. The empty kilometres come out of it — repositioning, no freight. They are
the easiest cost to miss when quoting, for the simple reason that they never
appear on a customer invoice.

When trips are entered retroactively and links in the chain are missing, the
dispatcher can choose manually which earlier trip Point 0 is taken from — so the
plan, the mileage and the empty kilometres do not anchor to the wrong trip.

Step 2 — the route reaches the truck and the driver

A plan that stays on the dispatcher’s screen is not a plan. It is an opinion.

The Tafi planner is the single source of truth for the route. Every planned route
is pushed automatically to the GPS system through a delivery ledger with
confirmation — not “send and hope”. If the transmission fails it is retried; it
does not vanish quietly.

The driver gets the route straight into the navigation on their phone (Sygic
Fleet), through a cryptographically signed link with a short validity. One tap
and they are navigating the route the company planned, not the one they or a car
sat-nav picked.

Worth stating plainly, because it gets skipped: if the route never reaches the
driver, the comparison at the end has nothing to compare against. Transmission is
not a convenience — it is the link that makes measurement possible.

Step 3 — measuring what was driven against what was planned

This is the core.

After the trip, the real GPS trace is laid over the planned route. Around the
plan there is a corridor. Whatever leaves the corridor appears on the map as
a red stretch — not a figure in a report, but a place you can point at.

Every red stretch gets an explanation from the dispatcher: closed road,
customer request, refuelling, parking, wrong turn. The explanation is not
bureaucracy. It is what turns a deviation into a cost with a cause.

At the end the arithmetic closes, and it can be checked:

km driven = km planned + km explained + km with no explanation

That last term is the number that costs money and that nobody sees without
measuring. The parasitic kilometres.

Deviations attributed to the driver reach the driver, as a warning — not only
the owner’s report. Behaviour changes only when the feedback returns to the
person who did the driving.

A lesson in method, paid for on real data

The real-versus-planned comparison is made only on trips that have both a saved
plan and real kilometres. Mix them and you falsify everything.

A concrete example: a driver was showing +114% against plan. A number you would
dismiss someone over. Except only half his trips had a saved plan — the rest went
into “real” with no “planned” in the other column. Restricted to trips with both,
the real difference was +7.4%.

Same measurement, two opposite conclusions. If your report does not state how
many trips the comparison was made on, it is not a report. It is an impression.

Where the figure goes next

A correctly measured kilometre does not stay in a route report. It feeds:

• Profitability per truck and per trip — real kilometres from telemetry, not
  the sum of the plans. Cost per km and margin per trip come from here.
• Fuel consumption — CAN litres against real kilometres. An L/100 km that
  means something.
• Tolls — the estimate from the plan against the real card cost, per trip.
  From 1 October, this line grows.
• Empty kilometres — separated from loaded ones, so you can see what
  repositioning costs you rather than just what transport costs you.
• Payroll and expense reports — per diems and settlements on trips with
  verified kilometres, not declared ones.

What you can do on Monday morning

Without buying anything:

1. Clean up your fleet’s technical data. Maximum authorised mass, axle count,
   emission class — correct, on every truck. From 1 October you pay on them. A
   Euro VI recorded as Euro III is a bigger invoice every month.
2. Save a plan on every trip, not just the complicated ones. No plan, no
   comparison — and trips without one spoil the average of the rest.
3. Set Point 0 correctly. If it starts from the wrong place, the empty
   kilometres are wrong, and your quote is wrong with them.
4. Require an explanation for every deviation above a threshold you choose —
   15 km, 25 km, whatever suits your work. What matters is that the threshold is
   fixed rather than judged case by case.
5. Send the feedback to the driver, not only into the office report.
6. Audit monthly: kilometres billed by your tolling provider against real
   kilometres from telematics. Misclassification and double-counting surface
   only this way.
7. Look at empty kilometres separately from loaded ones. If you do not
   separate them, you pay for repositioning out of the trip margin and never
   learn how much.

Frequently asked questions

How large are parasitic kilometres on a normal fleet?
Nobody knows, and that is the honest answer. There is no public statistic,
because very few companies compare the plan against the GPS trace. The only
figure that matters is yours, and you get it only by measuring.

Is this not the same as empty running?
No. Empty kilometres are kilometres without freight, but planned and necessary —
you are going to collect. Parasitic kilometres are off-route and unexplained. You
can have few empty and many parasitic, or the reverse.

What about old trips with no saved plan?
Leave them out of the comparison. A report built on incomplete trips is more
dangerous than no report, because it looks like a truth. Start saving plans today
and compare from here on.

Will drivers resent being tracked?
They resent measurements they do not understand and accusations without context.
Which is why every deviation gets an explanation before it becomes a number, and
the driver sees the same information the office sees. The one showing +114% above
would have had every right to be angry.

Does Tafi make me compliant with TollRo?
No. No platform makes you compliant — the obligation stays yours, and payment
goes through authorised providers. What Tafi does is measure, compare and
document: real kilometres per truck and per period, which you can check against
what you were billed.

If you want to see this arithmetic on your own trips rather than an example, book
a walkthrough and we will go through your fleet’s data.