There’s a moment at every Touch-a-Truck event that never gets old. A four-year-old climbs into the cab of an excavator, grabs the joystick with both hands, and looks back at their grown-up with an expression that says, I run this town now.
That’s the whole reason we haul our equipment down from the jobsite and park it on a closed-off street for a Saturday. If you’ve never been to one, a Touch-a-Truck is a free, family-friendly event where kids and adults get up close with fire trucks, police cruisers, construction rigs and specialty machinery — touching them, climbing on them, and asking a hundred questions about what each lever does.
Why a construction company bothers
Honestly? Partly because it’s fun. But there’s a practical side too, and we’re not shy about it.
The trades are short on people. 92 percent of construction companies report trouble filling open positions, according to the 2025 workforce survey from the Associated General Contractors of America and NCCER. That’s not a rounding error — that’s nearly everybody.
And it shows up in the work. Forty-five percent of firms in that same survey said projects are running late because of worker shortages, whether in their own crews or their subcontractors’. The gap is projected to grow, too — the industry needed about 439,000 additional workers in 2025, climbing toward roughly 499,000 for 2026.
Companies are throwing everything at it. Seven out of eight firms raised base pay, 42 percent spent more on training, and 55 percent added social media and digital advertising to their recruiting mix. All useful. But a job ad on a phone screen doesn’t do what a kid sitting in a skid steer does.
We’re not recruiting five-year-olds. We’re planting the idea that this is a real, respectable, interesting thing a person can do with their life — and that the person who does it might look like them.
What setup morning looks like
We show up around 6 a.m. Equipment moves slowly and early, before the streets fill with strollers.
Every machine gets parked, chocked, keyed off, and drained of any temptation. Buckets go all the way down to the ground. Hydraulics get locked out. Cones and barricades mark a walking lane so nobody’s cutting between a dump truck and a loader.
Then we build the queue. One kid in the cab at a time, one crew member on the ground beside the ladder, one at the top. It sounds like a lot of staffing for a free event, and it is. It’s also non-negotiable.
The safety talk we sneak in
Here’s our favorite trick. We set an orange cone at the edge of a machine’s blind spot and ask a parent to stand there while their kid sits in the operator’s seat. The kid can’t see them. Every time, there’s a little gasp.
That demo comes straight from real safety guidance. NIOSH has developed blind spot diagrams for vehicles commonly used on construction sites so operators understand what they can’t see. And the diagrams reveal something that matters enormously at a family event: an operator’s obstructed view shrinks as the object gets taller, but stays roughly the same to the sides and rear — which means short people, like children, are the hardest of all to see.
We tell parents the numbers, gently. Struck-by objects is a leading cause of construction deaths, and about 75 percent of struck-by fatalities involve heavy equipment like trucks or cranes. Struck-by incidents are the second leading cause of work-related death in construction, and the “Fatal Four” together account for 65 percent of construction deaths.
Then we hand out little hi-vis vests, because CDC/NIOSH guidance says high-visibility apparel “can be the difference between life and death” and recommends proximity warning systems on mobile equipment. Kids love the vests. Parents keep them for bike rides.
The quiet hour
Our first hour is horn-free, siren-free, and capped. That’s borrowed directly from sensory-friendly Touch-a-Truck programming, which uses designated low-stimulation quiet zones, capped attendance, visual schedules, and silenced horns and sirens so neurodivergent kids aren’t overwhelmed.
It’s not a niche idea anymore, either. Bierman Autism Centers ran eleven free sensory-friendly events across seven states in a single August, ten of them Touch-a-Trucks. If they can do that at scale, we can silence a horn for sixty minutes.
Where to find us this season
Touch-a-Truck runs on a predictable rhythm across Colorado — most of them tied to spring and summer parks-and-rec calendars, with a scattering of fall harvest festivals. Trails Park and Recreation District in Centennial hosts one, and the format repeats in towns up and down the Front Range.
It’s worth knowing that these are often short and popular. Cities frequently run them as annual two-hour events at city hall, so arriving in the first twenty minutes is the difference between a photo in the cab and a photo of the line.
Check your local parks and recreation district’s special events page as spring schedules post, and watch for us on the announcement. We’ll be the ones with the excavator, the cone demo, and a milk crate of tiny orange vests.
Come say hi. Bring the kid who won’t stop pointing at backhoes from the car window — you know the one.
Sources
- Trails Park and Recreation District's Touch a Truck Community Event | Centennial, CO
- Touch-A-Truck – Johns Creek
- Scottsdale Touch-A-Truck Event for Kids With Autism
- Bierman Autism Centers Hosts Touch-a-Truck Events Nationwide
- AGC/NCCER 2025 Craft Workforce Survey – NCCER
- AGC 2025 Workforce Survey Indicates Workforce Shortages Causing Project Delays | Jones Walker LLP
- 2025 Workforce Survey Analysis Summary (AGC of America)
- Construction Workforce Shortage 2026: 500K Workers Needed
- eTool: Construction – Struck-By | Occupational Safety and Health Administration
- 41 Construction Safety Statistics for 2024 | BigRentz
- Preventing Backovers – Additional Resources | Occupational Safety and Health Administration
- Look For Mobile Equipment Blind Spots (CDC/NIOSH)
- Time to Talk about Equipment Blind Spots | Delaware Center for Transportation
