For trucking fleets, a place to park may be the next driver perk

Nationally the network lists more than 6,400 locations across 50 states. That’s up from the 5,000 it passed in April, and it is targeting 10,000 by the end of 2026. Drivers from 93 of the top 100 fleets have already parked at its locations. One fleet that plugs into the platform gains yard capacity it never has to sign a lease for.

The retention math fleets never ran

Large fleets know they have a turnover problem. Until recently, almost none of them treated parking as a lever. Loustalot said the gap surfaces the moment he asks a direct question on a trade show floor.

“Oftentimes if I’m at a conference and I’m talking to somebody who’s a fleet manager or something like that or just in ops, I’ll ask them, ‘Do you do anything to provide parking for your drivers?’ And for a lot of them they’re kind of just like, ‘Well, I don’t really know what I could do, right?'”

They had a point, he said, because the alternative involves time and a lot of guesswork.

“They could essentially just fire up Google Maps and say, ‘Hey driver, you can go check this rest area out. I have no clue if there’s any space but there you go.'”

The benefits run downstream from there. A driver who knows where to park in advance does not burn an hour from the clock looking for it. For high-value freight, it can now sit behind a secured fence overnight.

“Your drivers aren’t stopping an hour short of their drive time every day to park,” Loustalot said. “If they’re transporting sensitive freight, you can book them higher security locations.”

When surveyed, drivers consistently rank the parking problem nearly at the top of their list. Truck parking placed second among commercial drivers in the American Transportation Research Institute’s 2025 survey of more than 4,200 industry stakeholders, behind only compensation, and fourth among all respondents.

Fleet truck parking accounts built like a toll pass

Truck Parking Club has spent three and a half years building the account structure that lets a fleet decide who does the booking. Drivers can hold company accounts funded by a shared payment method or a deposit, and dispatchers, safety staff or fleet managers can book on their behalf instead.

“In the same way that you would like a toll pass. Fleets just fill up the toll pass and drivers go use it and that’s that. It’s the same sort of idea. We can do that,” Loustalot said.

The reporting layer is the key part of what turns it into a viable fleet product.

“All the while the fleet has all the visibility of where the bookings are, what locations they’re parking at, who’s doing it, how much are they spending,” Loustalot said.

Volume data suggests the plumbing holds. More than 500,000 units have parked through the network, Loustalot said, spanning solo drivers booking a night to fleets dropping 500 trailers across 50 locations.

What fleets are really renting is real estate they cannot otherwise touch.

“They can’t go out and sign a bunch of long-term leases on property all over the country. … They just don’t want to deal with it. And why would they? But we just give you essentially access to yards anywhere,” Loustalot said.

Why every parking conversation ends up in Texas

Hutto joined Truck Parking Club in 2025 after more than two decades in freight technology and media, including a run as chief relationship officer at Truckstop and leadership roles at Randall Reilly. TXTA was founded in 1932 and represents hundreds of member companies, from small family fleets to Fortune 500 carriers.

“Every parking conversation in this industry eventually becomes a conversation about Texas,” Hutto said. “The freight is here, the drivers are here, and the shortage is here. Serving on the board widens that work to the full set of issues facing trucking in Texas.”

The state’s public rest areas hold 1,409 truck parking spaces, or 7.6 spaces for every 100 miles of National Highway System roadway, according to state-level data ATRI released in April 2025. Texas spends $17,033 a year maintaining each of those public spaces. Two parking supplies exist in the state, and the gap between them is whether a driver can reserve the space before arriving.

The board seat puts a parking vendor in the room where Texas carriers set their policy agenda.

“Brent’s expertise in addressing one of our industry’s most pressing challenges, safe and accessible truck parking, will be a tremendous asset as we continue advancing the interests of Texas trucking,” said TXTA President and CEO John Esparza.

Association work runs parallel to the company’s sales push into large fleets, and Loustalot said the two feed each other because the education has to happen before a fleet manager knows the category exists.

“A big part of our job is education. And when I say education, I don’t mean we have all the answers,” Loustalot said. “Everything that we’ve learned about how to use us, we’ve actually really just learned from our customers.”

State associations are where that transfer scales. The company has a representative working with the Kentucky Trucking Association, Loustalot said, and Hutto’s board role reaches past anything it books out of it.

“He’s been tapped on the shoulder to help steer,” Loustalot said. “He’s going to bring a lot of value to them and so that goes above and beyond his mission with us.”

The truck parking shortage as a routing input

Large fleets automated two decisions on every long haul years ago: where to buy diesel and which tolls to skip. The third one, where the truck sleeps, still runs on guesswork and phone calls. Extending the same optimization logic to the overnight spot is not the hard part, Loustalot said, and he puts the difficulty squarely on the supply side.

“The routing and the decision-making logic and the technology around that, it’s not obviously simple, but that’s the easy part. The hard part is the network that you plug into to facilitate it,” he said. “Just think about how much more optimized you are when you have access to hundreds of thousands of additional spaces that you can operate with a certainty that they’re going to exist.”

Loustalot used an example of electric car charger routing logic to describe the destination.

“If you’ve ever driven a Tesla and you’ve plugged in a route, say from Chattanooga to Chicago, the battery is not going to take you the whole way. So what Tesla does is they say, ‘Hey, here’s your route. It’s 650 miles or whatever. You need to charge here,'” he said. “That’s probably a close analogy to what we’re doing and where we’re going, which is a world where you as a driver can have that same sort of experience, but instead of charging your Tesla, it’s where you park in your truck.”

None of it gets marketed on the machine learning underneath.

“Nobody cares about how the sausage is made,” Loustalot said. “They care that it works and that it provides serious value.”

Interfaces are the next build. A voice booking flow keeps a driver’s hands on the wheel, and third-party portals put the network in front of fleets already running someone else’s software.

Truck Parking Club announced an integration with fleet platform provider Platform Science in July 2025.

“If a driver could make a phone call on a headset and find a spot and basically have like a travel agent, but like a parking agent essentially, that’s a realistic kind of user interface we could bolt on to our network,” Loustalot said. “The more ways we can do it, the more kind of interfaces we can plug into, whether it’s ours or some of our third party partners like Platform Science.”

The in-cab version is the one that would put parking in the same tier as fuel routing.

“We’re having serious conversations with some of the companies who are in a position to put us in the cabs to provide that sort of experience at a very large scale,” Loustalot said. “And so that’s where we’re going.”