London has a far lower rate of harsh driving events than the city’s congestion would suggest, new data from Geotab indicates.

The latest European Urban Freight Efficiency Index, based on full-year 2025 data from seven capitals, shows that the UK capital defies European trends for road efficiency.

The index found a general link between how well a city’s roads flow and how often harsh events occur on them. Berlin, the most efficient city in the study, recorded the fewest harsh acceleration, braking and cornering events, at 225 per 1,000 trips. At the other end, Paris and Madrid recorded 1,191 and 1,088, more than one for every journey.

But London breaks that pattern. The city is the second-worst for road efficiency among the seven European capitals, scoring 29 out of 100 – ahead of only Madrid. Yet it records 462 harsh events per 1,000 trips, roughly one every two journeys. That is less than half the rate in Paris and Madrid, even though Paris scores higher than London for efficiency. Dublin (315), Amsterdam (356) and Rome (393) all sit between Berlin and London, in line with their stronger efficiency scores. London still logged 31.4 million harsh events across 2025, the second-highest total of the seven cities after Madrid’s 32.1 million.

Geotab said that congestion charging and active enforcement may help explain why London’s rate is lower than its road network alone would suggest. The research does not isolate the effect of any single measure.

The contrast with Paris is sharpest. More than three-quarters (79%) of harsh events there are sudden accelerations, which may mean that drivers are pulling away hard from almost every standstill. London’s profile is more balanced, with acceleration at 45.5%, braking at 38.7% and cornering at 15.8%.

But Geotab warns that despite having a lower harsh-event rate, London is not an easy place to operate. Stop-start traffic and unpredictable journey times remain a major challenge for fleets in the capital.

The Index also found that lorries move more efficiently than cars in five of the seven capitals, helped by professional route planning, set delivery windows and off-peak scheduling. London is one of the two exceptions, with lorries scoring 27 against 29 for cars. Bus lanes that lorries can’t use, narrow delivery streets and loading routes that push deliveries into busy periods are all likely to play a part.

For fleet managers, the findings show how strongly road conditions shape driver data. A driver recording around 1,000 harsh events per 1,000 trips would be close to average in Madrid, but more than four times the Berlin average. Judging drivers against the city they operate in helps fleets see which events come down to behaviour and which come down to the road.

Geotab added that the findings underline the value of using connected vehicle data to benchmark driver behaviour against local conditions for city-specific decisions.

Edward Kulperger, senior vice president, EMEA at Geotab, elaborated: “A harsh event rate only means something when you know which city the driver is working in. The same number can be an average day in London and a warning sign in Berlin.

“Where the pattern is sudden acceleration, coaching and in-cab feedback can make a real difference. Where it is sharp cornering at a particular junction, a change of route will often do more. Fleets that can see which of the two they are dealing with are in a much better position to act. That is what data and benchmarking make possible: they turn a city-level pattern into something a fleet can act on. Video telematics can also add the context behind an individual event, so a coaching conversation can start from what actually happened on the road.”

Geotab’s full European Urban Freight Efficiency Index is online here.