Reading time: 4 minutes.
As of August 25, 2026, the average price of diesel in Canada sits at 236.6 cents a litre — up 86 cents from this time last year. With global conflicts continuing to drive uncertainty in oil markets, fuel costs remain difficult to predict — and even harder to plan around.
When prices rise, most businesses look first to the commercial side of the equation: renegotiate the fuel surcharge, cap exposure, change suppliers, or pass the increase downstream.
Diesel prices remain unpredictable, but the number of miles a network requires is not. That distinction is what makes fuel cost management a network design decision, not just a procurement conversation.
Cost of fuel is only half the equation
Fuel represented roughly 21% of total trucking operating cost last year in the United States — $0.482 of every $2.336 per mile — according to ATRI's 2026 Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking. These figures are US-only, but serve as a reasonable proxy for Canada, where fuel makes up a similar share of trucking costs. Those miles are the other half of the equation. When fuel becomes more expensive, inefficiencies that were already present in the network become more expensive too.
For a network running 2 million miles a year, even 15% of those miles being avoidable (extra backtracking, underutilized dedicated capacity, routes sized for peak rather than actual demand) represents roughly $411,000 in annual fuel cost, assuming fuel at $2.366/L and fleet fuel consumption of ~36 L/100 km.
There are three questions that matter most when understanding a network:
1. Are you running the right asset for the demand?
A dedicated, high-fixed-cost vehicle running a route sized for peak season, every day, all year, burns fuel against demand that isn't there most of the time.
The objective is to align capacity with real volumes, so fuel spend scales with demand rather than sitting fixed against it. Instead of defaulting every delivery requirement into the same operating model, businesses can deliberately combine Exclusive, Fractional and Hybrid capacity based on actual demand patterns.
2. Are your routes truly optimized?
A genuinely optimized delivery network must balance delivery windows, live capacity, SLA commitments, customer requirements and changing road conditions — and continuously adjust as those conditions change.
In practice, that means routes built dynamically against live conditions rather than fixed to a plan made the night before — capacity rebalanced in real time as a delivery falls through, a road closes, or a same-day order comes in, rather than reworked manually after the fact.
That distinction separates a network that mostly avoids backtracking from one actively engineered not to.
3. How much of your capacity are you actually using?
Dedicated capacity provides control and consistency, but it can also leave businesses carrying the full cost of vehicles, drivers, and fuel even when demand fluctuates.
A Hybrid model can combine dedicated capacity with shared capacity where demand is variable — improving the amount of useful delivery work generated per unit of fuel consumed. Importantly, it's a structural choice made when the network is designed, not a workaround adopted after costs rise.
These three questions matter, but they're not one-time answers.
Adaptability is the advantage
The strongest transportation networks aren't designed around a single set of assumptions — they're designed to perform across changing conditions. That means asset mix, routing logic, and capacity structure that can adjust as those conditions shift, rather than a network built to hold up only under the conditions that existed when it was designed.
The businesses weathering fuel volatility most effectively have stopped treating fuel cost management as an annual procurement exercise and started treating it as an ongoing network design discipline — continually revisiting the same three questions as conditions change, not just once at setup.
Route density, delivery frequency, and asset utilization can carry as much weight in cost performance as the fuel price itself. Fuel costs are what they are. The real competitive edge is a network that absorbs more of the hit before it ever reaches the bottom line.
Where Ziing fits
This is the operating model behind what we call an Orchestrated Delivery Ecosystem: networks built deliberately around the right mix of Exclusive, Fractional, and Hybrid capacity, with routing decisions made by AI-driven technology against live conditions rather than a static plan, and service partners selected and governed to hold that structure together at scale. It's a network built so that when fuel prices move — and they will continue to move — the businesses running on it aren't left starting from behind.
The design decision that remains
Fuel prices will remain unpredictable. The network moving freight through that unpredictability is still a design choice, not a fixed cost.
The federal fuel excise tax suspension on diesel has been extended until January 31, 2027, but that relief is temporary. For businesses uncertain whether their current structure is working for them or quietly working against them, now is the time to assess the network design, operating model, and transportation strategy behind the numbers, before fuel costs begin rising again in 2027.
Talk to our team and get a free network assessment