Earlier this month, a Greyhound bus on the way to St. Louis smashed into three 18-wheelers parked along a highway exit ramp in southern Illinois. Three people were killed and 14 injured, including the driver of the bus. Federal investigators are trying to figure out what happened, but they knew one thing right away: Those trucks were not supposed to be there.
Yet, as any trucker will tell you, highway off-ramps are often the only place to catch some shut-eye—thanks to a national truck parking shortage. Surveys of truckers show near-unanimous agreement that parking has become a serious challenge, with one study reporting that drivers sacrifice almost an hour of driving time every day to make sure they have a safe and legal parking spot for the night. Multiply that over a couple of million truckers and you end up with a lot of lost wages, snarled supply chains, illegal parking jobs, and even more trucks on the road to pick up the slack.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, speaking to (really) the National Coalition on Truck Parking last year, said the issue was a priority for the Biden administration: “We owe our truckers a safe place to rest—not just because it’s the right thing to do and not only because it’s going to save drivers time and money, but because everyone is better off when truckers can do their jobs to the best of their abilities.”
Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of federal lawmakers wants to spend more than $750 million to build more truck parking. “This money is being allocated so it gets spent on this, rather than the money getting siphoned off into bridges and roads,” said Rep. Mike Bost, a Republican from Illinois who told me he drove his first big rig at the age of 9. (His brother runs the family trucking business.) “If you don’t designate the money specifically, states do more roads and bridges and all that.”
In other words, just about everybody agrees we need more truck parking. There’s just one problem: Truck parking isn’t like most infrastructure, which gives politicians a happy opportunity to cut a ribbon in front of cheering constituents. As Lewie Pugh, a former trucker and vice president at the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, put it: “There’s nothing sexy about building a truck parking lot.” You could go further: Everybody hates truck parking. “They want trucks to bring them things, but they don’t want trucks to stick around. In a perfect world, the trucks would be up in the sky, sure.”
As regular readers of this column will know, I tend to be skeptical about drivers crying parking shortage. In reality, there’s more than enough car parking in this country, and claims to the contrary are often used to stifle much-needed community investments in affordable housing and safe streets. With truckers, it’s a little different. Truckers really don’t have that many places to spend the night, statistically speaking—just 300,000 overnight spaces, 90 percent of them privately operated.
The problem isn’t exactly new. Trucking boomed after deregulation in 1980. More than a decade ago, Congress passed Jason’s Law, which required states to keep tabs on truck parking. Named for Jason Rivenburg, a New York trucker who was murdered after he parked to sleep at an abandoned South Carolina gas station, the law prompted a series of state and federal reports that have called attention to the challenge.
But it’s getting worse. Over the past decade, Congress has changed trucking regulations to require more rest time—right as it has asked truckers to carry electronic logging devices. No longer can drivers fudge their records to make it a few more miles to a safe place to park. Meanwhile, just-in-time supply chains have tightened timelines, right as e-commerce demands more deliveries than ever. In 2021 U.S. tractor-trailers drove 195 billion miles—twice as many miles as trucks drove just 30 years ago.
Car drivers routinely exaggerate how difficult it is to find parking, and truckers may be vulnerable to this tendency as well. But there are a few factors that distinguish truckers from the rest of us on this score. For one thing, tractor-trailers are large. For another, many cities and towns have enacted truck-parking bans, making most curbside spaces off limits. For a third, truckers are subject to strict rules about how long they’re allowed to drive before stopping to rest. Unlike you or me, when a trucker needs to park, they legally need to park.
What’s more, demand for the goods they haul across the country is strongest in big metro areas, which can barely find room to build housing—let alone truck parking. Unlike car parking, which is often required of new projects, truck parking is likely to be zoned out of existence, or at least zoned into industrial areas alongside more valuable land uses that crowd it out, said Trent Cameron, a co-founder of the truck parking company Semi-Stow. The nation’s 32 biggest metro areas for freight contain less than 10 percent of its truck parking, according to a recent federal handbook.
“The reason this requires federal money is because city ordinances are making the land you can actually utilize for truck parking, that has the proper zoning, egregiously expensive,” Cameron said. “It is very hard to find the right piece of property at the right basis that has a by-right use for truck and trailer parking.” What’s more, he reckons, even a billion dollars in federal money will buy only about 20,000 parking spaces—a modest increase.
Nor is this an issue in just the congested Northeast Corridor or the NIMBY Republic of California. Consider the case of Spanish Valley, Utah, a town near Arches National Park that has been battling a Love’s truck stop for half a decade, with residents concerned about light pollution, air pollution, drug use, prostitution, and human trafficking.
Or this viral video of a truck driver in rural Henry County, Georgia, being threatened with a summons for parking his truck in his own driveway.
When it comes to sleeping spots for long-haul truckers, though, truck drivers do have something in common with your average driver: They don’t want to pay to park. Most truck parking is free, either at public rest areas or privately run truck stops that make their money selling diesel fuel, showers, and hot food. Paid truck parking has become more common in recent years, with private operators outpacing states 10-to-1 in providing truck parking spots. Those companies are gradually adopting reservation systems that allow drivers to book a spot in advance, for a price.
Still, parking is a low-margin business, and old habits die hard, even in a time of scarcity. “There’s very strong pressure to reduce cost and compete on price, and independent drivers are paid by the mile,” said Sebastian Guerrero, a truck parking analyst. “You don’t get paid if you take a toll. And you don’t get paid for reserved parking.”
Having Congress pay to help park trucks, Guerrero argued, could be justified simply in the interest of improving highway safety for everyone. Down the road, too, ample, state-of-the-art truck parking infrastructure will be necessary to electrify the fleet. Not only is it unsafe to park on the side of the road—you probably won’t find an outlet.
