DOT Awards Five States $6.25 Million to Help Ease Shortage of Safe Truck Parking

This story appears in the July 5 print edition of Transport Topics.

The U.S. Department of Transportation in June awarded grants totaling $6.25 million to five states to “ease truck parking shortages on U.S. interstates.”

States receiving the aid were: Utah for work on Interstate 15, Mississippi for Interstate 10, Oregon for Interstate 5, Tennessee for Interstate 40 and Pennsylvania for Interstate 81.

The grants were made under the Truck Parking Facilities pilot program in the 2005 Safe Accountable Flexible Efficient Transportation Equity Act.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said the funds would be used to increase truck parking capacity and develop ways to provide information on space availability to drivers.

With many states closing rest areas as a way to downsize transportation budgets, concern has arisen about safe parking along heavily traveled interstate corridors.

Deborah Hersman, head of the National Transportation Safety Board, told Transport Topics on June 25 that adequate rest stops were vital to minimize risk to truck drivers.

“We were certainly very disappointed during the budget cuts that were going on in states that they were making decisions to close rest stops, especially in very busy, heavily traveled corridors,” Hersman said.

American Trucking Associations praised the grant as a “commitment to safe truck parking.”

A federal proposal, dubbed “Jason’s Law,” already would provide funds for parking, and some states — New York, for example — are proposing similar incentives to allocate funds for new, safe rest areas on highways.

“Jason’s Law” was named to honor truck driver Jason Rivenburg, who was killed in South Carolina when he pulled off a highway to rest.

Pennsylvania and Mississippi received the largest shares of the grant at $2.1 million each. Tennessee received $800,000; Utah, $545,000; and Oregon, $480,000.

Pennsylvania has faced an “ongoing challenge” in providing truck parking for drivers to meet hours-of-service limits, said Erin Waters, information specialist for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.

She said the state plans to use its grant to develop a system to alert truckers about the availability of parking along Interstate 81.

“The initial concept is that information on available spaces would be posted on our variable message boards along I-81,” Waters said. “

Mississippi has proposed creating 80 parking spaces along the stretch of I-10 from the Louisiana border to Bay St. Louis, said U.S. DOT spokeswoman Nancy Singer. This stretch of highway, on which about 12,000 trucks travel each day, will have two of its closed truck inspection station reconstructed.

Julie Oaks, public information officer for the Tennessee Department of Transportation, said the state has been working on a project called “SmartPark,” which will be funded by the federal grant. SmartPark “advise[s] truckers via highway advisory radios and dynamic message signs on the locations of available truck parking spaces at truck stops on the interstate . . . as much as 50 miles in advance,” Oaks said.

In Utah, drivers hauling goods from California ports often run out of hours on the stretch of I-15 that runs from Nevada to Salt Lake City. According to the federal DOT, the Utah Trucking Association and its partners have worked with the state to plan “innovations that will provide for truck parking in big-box store lots,” such as Target, Home Depot or Walmart.

Oregon plans to use its grant to expand a truck parking facility in partnership with the Cow Creek Tribe to combat what Travis Brouwer, federal affairs adviser for the Oregon Department of Transportation, called “pretty significant topographical challenges” in the southern ­region of the state.

Mountain passes and bad weather along the I-5 corridor create steep-grade bottlenecks for trucks, whose drivers “need to stop for hours and sometimes for days,” Brouwer said.

To receive the grants, state officials needed to submit an application demonstrating a “severe shortage” of commercial vehicle parking in the corridor and demonstrate that their proposed projects were “likely to have positive effects.” For the states that were chosen, the projects are funded by an 80/20 federal-state share or a 100% federal share, if qualified.