This comes up constantly and people usually guess wrong, because the instinct is that one lorry must be cheaper than two.
The arithmetic
A lorry costs money by the day, more or less. Send it out twice and you have paid for two days, plus the running between. Send two out once and you have paid for two days with no second journey.
So the question is really: how long is the round trip? If the site is forty minutes away, one lorry doing two runs is comfortably a day and is usually the answer. If it is in Aberdeen, two lorries in convoy is not just faster, it is cheaper, because the alternative is four days of driving instead of two.
The bit the arithmetic misses
Site time. Every arrival costs a site induction, a set-up, a permit, sometimes a road closure window. If the site charges you for a closure by the day, or the traffic management is booked by the day, a second visit can cost several times what the lorry costs.
That is why on constrained city jobs we will often recommend more vehicles than you expected. Not to sell lorries — because one closure with three lorries in it beats three closures.
When one lorry is definitely right
When the site can only take one vehicle at a time, which is more common than people think. A yard with one turning space, a residential street, a compound with a single gate. Two lorries queueing in the road is worse than one lorry going twice.
Just ask
Tell us how many units, where they are going and what the site can hold, and we will tell you which way round it works out. It takes about a minute and it is the sort of thing we get right by having done it a lot rather than by being clever.
Send the details · Regular multi-load work · Long-distance jobs
