HERE Truck Routing

Setting transportMode=truck selects the truck routing engine. It does not tell HERE how tall your vehicle is. Omit the dimensions and you get a route. It returns 200. It contains a polyline. It may also route a 4.1-metre trailer under a 3.4-metre bridge, and HERE will not warn you, because you did not tell it there was a trailer. This is the single most consequential detail on this site.

What problem this guide solves

Car routing optimizes for time. Truck routing optimizes for time subject to physical and legal feasibility. Bridge clearances. Weight limits. Axle restrictions. Hazmat prohibitions. Turn radii. Roads where commercial vehicles are banned outright. If your product dispatches commercial vehicles, an infeasible route is not a UX defect. It is a bridge strike, a citation, or a driver reversing a 53-foot trailer down a residential street.

When to use truck routing

Any vehicle above light-passenger class: trucks, vans over 3.5t, tractor-trailers
Hazardous materials transport
Oversized or overweight loads
ELD and fleet platforms where the route drives compliance
Any case where the map’s truck attributes — weight limits, height restrictions, preferred truck routes — must be respected

When NOT to use it

Passenger vehicles. Truck routing on a sedan produces longer, slower routes for no benefit.
Light commercial vehicles that legally route as cars. HERE exposes a category parameter with a lightTruck value, which exempts the vehicle from many legal truck restrictions while still applying physical dimension limits. Check whether your fleet qualifies before paying the routing penalty.
Multi-stop optimization. Truck routing gives you A→B. Ordering the stops is Tour Planning.
Distance matrices. Matrix Routing supports truck mode. Do not loop.

The constrained request

curl -gX GET 'https://router.hereapi.com/v8/routes?'\
'transportMode=truck&'\
'origin=42.0641,-88.0509&'\
'destination=41.5250,-88.0817&'\
'vehicle[height]=410&'\
'vehicle[grossWeight]=35000&'\
'truck[axleCount]=5&'\
'return=summary,polyline&'\
'apiKey=YOUR_API_KEY'

import os, requests

def truck_route(origin: str, destination: str) -> dict:
    resp = requests.get(
        "https://router.hereapi.com/v8/routes",
        params={
            "transportMode": "truck",
            "origin": origin,
            "destination": destination,
            "vehicle[height]": 410,          # centimetres
            "vehicle[grossWeight]": 35000,   # kilograms
            "truck[axleCount]": 5,
            "return": "summary,polyline",
            "apiKey": os.environ["HERE_API_KEY"],
        },
        timeout=15,
    )
    resp.raise_for_status()
    body = resp.json()
    if not body.get("routes"):
        raise RuntimeError(f"No route: {body.get('notice')}")
    return body["routes"][0]

Units are not obvious and are not validated for plausibility. height is centimetres. grossWeight is kilograms. Pass 4.1 for a 4.1-metre vehicle and HERE will route a four-centimetre truck through everything. The response will be 200.

Confirm every unit against the Routing API v8 reference before you ship. This is not a place to guess.

Key concepts

grossWeight replaced weightLimit. The older weightLimit parameter is deprecated in the current v8 specification. If you are reading a 2021 tutorial, you are reading a deprecated parameter. axleCount counts the whole combination. Base vehicle plus every attached trailer. Valid range is 2–255. Supported in truck, bus, and privateBus; in car and taxi it carries beta status. Hazmat is a classed enum, not a boolean. HERE exposes shippedHazardousGoods with class values including B, C, D, and E. Which classes are supported depends on transport mode. Do not map your internal hazmat flags without reading the reference. category=lightTruck is a legal exemption, not a physical one. It exempts the vehicle from many restrictions written for normal trucks. Restrictions on physical dimensions and cargo still apply. Setting it does not let you skip height and grossWeight. Constraints you do not send are constraints HERE cannot apply. There is no partial mode. There is no warning. The engine assumes an unconstrained vehicle for anything you omit.

Validating that constraints are actually applied

This is the part most teams skip, and the reason bridge strikes make the news. Route a vehicle with a height of 410 cm through these locations. If any returns a path, your constraints are not reaching the engine:

Location	Constraint
11foot8 bridge, Durham, NC	Clearance well below 4.1 m
Storrow Drive, Boston, MA	Commercial vehicles prohibited; low overpasses
Southern State Parkway, Long Island, NY	Commercial vehicles prohibited

Wire these three into your CI suite as assertions, not as a manual QA step. A refactor that drops vehicle[height] from the params dict is invisible in code review and obvious in a failing test.

Run the same three with transportMode=car. Every one should return a route. That is your control — it proves the test is exercising the constraint and not merely failing for an unrelated reason.

Production architecture

Vehicle profiles belong in your data model, not in call sites. Height, weight, axle count, hazmat class, and category are attributes of a vehicle. Store them once. Pass them everywhere. Do not let a developer hardcode height=410 in a new endpoint. Validate profiles at write time. A vehicle record with a null height should fail validation before it ever reaches a routing call. Truck routing is slower than car routing. More constraints, more search space. Size your timeouts and your UI accordingly. Compliance and routing are coupled. For ELD platforms, the route determines hours-of-service feasibility. If routing changes, HOS projections change. Model that dependency explicitly rather than discovering it in an audit.

Cost and usage considerations

Truck routing bills as a routing transaction. The cost gap versus Google is largest here, because Google offers no equivalent depth of commercial vehicle constraints — the comparison is capability, not price.

Truck routing inclusion in HERE’s free tier should be confirmed against your specific account before you scope a pilot around it. Free-tier product coverage varies and should not be inferred from general documentation. Placematic can confirm your entitlement before you commit engineering time.

For matrices of truck travel times, Matrix Routing accepts truck mode and vehicle parameters. One call, not N.

Common mistakes

Setting transportMode=truck and stopping there. The engine is selected. The vehicle is not described. Passing metres instead of centimetres. A four-centimetre truck routes anywhere. Using the deprecated weightLimit. Use grossWeight. Counting only the tractor’s axles. axleCount includes trailers. Mapping an internal is_hazmat boolean onto HERE’s classed enum. Read the class definitions. Assuming lightTruck waives dimension limits. It waives legal restrictions. Bridges do not care about your category. Validating on synthetic coordinates. Two points in a parking lot will route under any constraint set. Test on geometry designed to reject you. Shipping without regression tests on trap locations. The constraint that silently disappeared in a refactor is the one that ends up in an incident report.

Best practices

Store vehicle dimensions as first-class model attributes
Assert trap-geometry rejection in CI, with a car-mode control
Confirm every unit against HERE’s reference before first deploy
Fail loudly on a routing response with empty routes
Confirm free-tier and contract entitlement for truck mode before scoping
Use Matrix Routing for many-to-many, with truck parameters

API reference

Routing API v8 reference — full truck parameter tables and enums
Transport modes
Truck categories are documented within the Routing v8 developer guide

Routing

The base engine, request shaping, and error semantics.

Matrix Routing

Truck travel times across many origins and destinations, in one call.

HERE vs Google Maps

Where the commercial vehicle gap is decisive.

HERE Pricing Explained

Asset-based versus call-volume pricing for fleet workloads.

Also: Choosing the Right HERE APIs · Authentication · HERE Location Services

Need production HERE API keys or implementation support? Placematic is an official HERE Technologies reseller and implementation partner helping companies choose the right HERE APIs, estimate usage, migrate from Google Maps and build production-ready geospatial solutions. We have deployed HERE truck routing into production ELD systems. Talk to us.

Start here

Guides

HERE Truck Routing — Implementation Guide

HERE Truck Routing

What problem this guide solves

When to use truck routing

When NOT to use it

The constrained request

Key concepts

Validating that constraints are actually applied

Production architecture

Cost and usage considerations

Common mistakes

Best practices

API reference

Routing

Matrix Routing

HERE vs Google Maps

HERE Pricing Explained

​HERE Truck Routing

​What problem this guide solves

​When to use truck routing

​When NOT to use it

​The constrained request

​Key concepts

​Validating that constraints are actually applied

​Production architecture

​Cost and usage considerations

​Common mistakes

​Best practices

​API reference

​Related guides

Routing

Matrix Routing

HERE vs Google Maps

HERE Pricing Explained

HERE Truck Routing

What problem this guide solves

When to use truck routing

When NOT to use it

The constrained request

Key concepts

Validating that constraints are actually applied

Production architecture

Cost and usage considerations

Common mistakes

Best practices

API reference

Related guides