Mixed-Fleet Routing: EVs in the Zone, Diesels on the Ring

The Mixed-Fleet Reality in Dutch Cities

Most delivery operators no longer run a single-technology fleet. Electric vans handle the inner-city drops where milieuzones restrict or penalize diesel entry, while diesel vehicles still carry the bulk of volume on longer, ring-road-heavy routes. The challenge isn't choosing EV or diesel — it's routing both simultaneously without creating scheduling gaps that blow same-day SLAs. A dispatcher who treats the fleet as homogeneous will either send diesels into zones they shouldn't enter or waste EV range and charging windows on legs better suited to combustion vehicles.

Zone-Aware Segmentation, Not Zone-Wide Bans

The first practical step is segmenting delivery zones by access rules rather than by geography alone. Many milieuzones apply only to specific vehicle categories or emission classes, and boundaries can be tighter than a simple city outline suggests. Building a routing layer that flags which stops sit inside a low-emission zone — and which sit just outside on the ring or in transition areas — lets planners assign the right vehicle type before a route is even built. This is different from static "no diesel in city center" rules, because some zones exempt certain van classes or allow timed access windows that a blunt ban would miss.

Once stops are tagged, the routing logic can group inner-zone drops for EVs and perimeter or ring-road drops for diesel, minimizing cross-zone detours that eat into delivery windows. The goal is fewer boundary crossings, not fewer vehicles.

Sequencing to Protect Same-Day Windows

Same-day SLAs usually fail not because a vehicle is banned from a zone, but because the route wasn't sequenced to account for the handoff between vehicle types. A common pattern that works well: EVs run tight, looped routes inside the zone during off-peak charging-friendly windows, while diesels handle longer perimeter loops that feed transfer points at the zone edge. Cross-docking or curbside transfer points just outside the boundary let diesel-delivered parcels move to an EV or cargo bike for the final zone-internal leg without requiring the