According to a 2019 Jason’s Law Survey, there are only 313,000 truck parking spots in the continental United States to accommodate the more than 1.94 million for-hire trucks on the nation’s roads and highways. Not surprisingly, 98% of truck drivers reported having problems finding truck parking.
But over the past year, paid truck parking has become a reality for truck drivers. These locations provide clean and safe facilities for drivers to park their trucks and trailers overnight or longer.
While fleets have used drop yards for decades, the new focus is on providing private, paid truck parking for mid-size and small fleets, something the trucking industry sorely needs.
One of the market leaders is Truck Parking Club, a website and mobile app that helps truck drivers reserve and pay independent truck parking lot owners for overnight or more extended parking. According to the company, the app is adding an average of two new locations per day, each providing slightly more than 30 parking spots.
As of May 30, 2024, Truck Parking Club has 414 locations offering 13,134 spots. The company prides itself in providing “never before publicly available parking spaces.”
According to Evan Shelley, founder and CEO of Truck Parking Club, more than 3,000 trucking spots on the app were previously unavailable for public parking. In recent months, the percentage of these spots available for truck parking has increased due to the success other property owners have seen with the app.
Truck Parking Club has made it easy for truck drivers to book parking spaces, and truck parking lot owners to collect their fees, which was challenging before the app was created.
The ease of use and collection has attracted new fleets and lot owners, which is desperately needed by the industry. Nonetheless, the lack of safe and secure truck parking costs truck drivers time and money.
Truck drivers spend 58 minutes each day trying to find parking, resulting in an average of $5,500 in lost compensation per year per driver. Because ELD devices measure every hour of on-duty time, the issue is even more significant because the time drivers spend looking for parking cuts into their 11 hours of legal driving time.
In fact, in the American Transportation Research Institute’s (ATRI) 2023 survey of truck drivers’ top issues, truck parking ranked second, right behind the economy.
Also, according to a tweet by the American Trucking Associations’ (ATA) official X account, truck parking first appeared on the ATRI survey in 2012 and has been a top 5 issue for truck drivers ever since.
Trucking associations like the ATA, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, Women in Trucking, and state agencies like the Georgia Department of Transportation have been pushing for increased federal funding for truck parking, with limited results.
In the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, $300 million was allocated to multiple states for truck parking. While this sounds impressive, it only generated 1,000 new truck parking spots.
While the industry will welcome the additional parking, the new government-funded spots will only partially address the overall truck parking issue.
Why?
The trucking industry is growing much faster than the number of available parking spots. From 2009 to 2024, the industry added 69,000 new for-hire trucks to the national fleet annually, or an average of 1,335 trucks per week. While not every one of these trucks needs a parking space (because some park at company facilities or are out of service), the need for safe parking continues to grow.
Assuming state governments build the 1,000 new truck parking spots over the course of a year, the industry will have added another 69,000 for-hire trucks. In other words, the federal and state governments’ investment in truck parking is wholly insufficient to handle the industry’s parking needs.
That reality requires private sector solutions to solve the truck parking problem. The industry needs Truck Parking Club and other companies to provide private, for-hire parking.
This is only possible because private real estate owners are incentivized to set aside locations for public truck parking. If paid truck parking becomes a significant source of revenue, we could see the emergence of an entirely new type of industrial real estate.
But the idea of charging for truck parking has some truck drivers enraged.
Desiree, an outspoken critic of a number of the industry’s organizations and participants, attacked the concept on X:
However, Desiree and other drivers who do not want to pay for parking fail to understand that the only way to generate investment in private truck parking is to make it attractive enough for landowners to invest in truck parking spaces. If they can’t turn a profit on their land, they have no incentive to provide truck parking, and therefore, the industry will continue to suffer from a lack of parking.
Dominick Tullo described the issues with investing in trucking parking on his X account:
Dominick is right.
The only way to look at the truck parking issue is through the eyes of landowners. If we want more public parking available for drivers, the investment needs to be appealing and something that a bank would underwrite. The only way to do this is to ensure that truck parking is profitable.
Truck Parking Club has made three times as many spots available to truck drivers as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act did, without taking a single penny in taxpayer money.
Moreover, the app, which was launched in 2022, is just now gaining momentum.
The best feature of Truck Parking Club for drivers is that it eliminates the need to drive around and search for available parking spots, which can be tedious and expensive. After all, if drivers can see which locations are available and book a spot early in the day, they can continue their runs later in the night when the roads are less congested.
After all, the cost of lost wages, time, and fuel, not to mention the driver’s frustration in searching for a safe parking spot, is often more expensive than the overnight parking fee.
The market always finds a way — that is how capitalism works.
Disclosure: Craig Fuller is an adviser to Truck Parking Club
Richard Rose
Slugs for salt!
Boss hogg
Because trucking companies don’t want to reimburse the driver 12 to 15 per day to park sometimes 2 days I’d on a 34 hr reset. And the drivers don’t get paid enough to afford 15. To park 15 to shower that’s 30 bucks or more a day plus food and drinks and laundry
John Brown
It’s sad when in ga you have a place for truck parking and it’s full of jbhunt empty trailers so how does this help the small owner operator whom needs parking. Thanks for cutting out the little man cowboy truck parking.
Fleetwood
Before ELD we didn’t have an issue with parking. For the most part you could find parking everywhere and sometimes near or in a big city. As soon as ELD became part of this industry it seem that everybody crams in the lots starting at 3pm…by 5pm it’s locked down. I’m only saying this because I did it for 20 years and never had an issue until we all had to have a black box inside our rigs.
JASON A LYONS
How about the ungodly amount of taxes we pay legally entitles us to the required infrastructure to operate on the public roads that we pay for. We are literally taxed without representation as the rates we pay vary state to state.
Somehow SC used to maintain their roads for 13 cents per gallon until a few years ago while PA demanded 75 cents per gallon while having primarily tolled interstates.
Infrastructure is used to steal from us every single day while states refuse to put the money that truckers pay into parking. We should shut down on the interstates until they provide the necessary parking we have already paid for.
Some states have the gall to ticket trucks for parking on ramps while providing zero legal parking. This is extortion. But crap sites like this want to say we should have to pay even more. How about this, quit acting like the ATA and help truckers organize a strike on the worst states until the problem actually gets solved and crooked bastards quit stealing our tax money
Trucker_Bob
Look at paid free parking as a part of our national infrastructure. That should be a part of every national network and cities should have designated parking for trucks. We pay enough in highway use taxes, yet look where our money is going. Wait, I don’t see it. Our highways are crumbling and currently a lot of rest areas where drivers could park are being taken out of service. Our taxes should be maintaining these and building more. Not lining politicians pockets. And greedy businesses putting up paid parking and charging more than drivers can realistically afford given wages are technically going backwards. The mega-carriers don’t want that expense, so it comes out of most drivers pockets.
Matk
Just paying to park doesn’t mean it’s making it clean and safe whoever wrote this drivel hasn’t got any idea what a real driver goes through.
Barry Spring
So company drivers have to pay to a company truck. That’s $6k on average that they can’t even write off on taxes to recover some of that money.
Then there’s the math in the article. $300 million for 1000 parking spots were generated. That’s $300k per parking spot!!! I want in on that scheme, let me tell you.
What really pisses me off is the actual truck stops charging for parking after you’ve filled your tanks, bought their crap food and paid convenient store prices.
This bs! And it needs to stop!