How Much Are You Losing
to Idle Truck Time?

Where Does Idle Time Actually Come From?

On a busy excavation or civil site, idle time feels inevitable. But most of it comes from a handful of solvable problems:

• Trucks arriving before the excavator is ready. The truck sits, the clock runs, the driver waits.
• Trucks cycling back too fast. The dump site is far but the load time is short — trucks stack up at the pit.
• Last-minute truck swaps with no communication. A truck doesn't show, the site scrambles, an hour is lost.
• No visibility into where trucks are between loads. Dispatchers are guessing cycle times instead of managing them.

None of these are driver problems. They're coordination problems. And coordination problems are exactly what dispatch software is designed to solve.

Why 50% Is a Conservative Estimate

The savings figure above uses a 50% idle time reduction — deliberately conservative. Operations that move from phone/spreadsheet dispatch to real-time digital dispatch often see cycle time improvements of 30–70%, depending on how chaotic the existing process is.

The math that matters: if you're running 5 trucks at $120/hr with 1.5 hours of daily idle time each, that's $900/day walking out the door. Over a 250-day season, that's $225,000 — before you account for the downstream effects of delays (late loads, overtime, unhappy GC relationships).

What Tragget Does Differently

Tragget gives both the job site and the trucking company real-time visibility into the same dispatch. When the excavator is 20 minutes from being ready, the next truck gets the signal to leave — not sit at the gate. Cycle times tighten, idle time drops, and both sides bill more hours doing actual work.