Opinion: Truck Parking Is Quiet Crisis Facing Industry
This Opinion piece appears in the Feb. 13 print edition of Transport Topics. By Tom Lee
Empire Warehouse
Each night, thousands of truck drivers across the country find themselves in a horrible game of “musical chairs” — searching for parking spaces to take their mandated 10-hour rest period. This occurs because of a major shortage for truck parking, which has not kept up with the volume and growth of trucks traveling across our country each day.
Tom LeeTo illustrate this problem, one needs only to look at a recent statement by the former secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, Mark Gottlieb, who noted that the average over-the-road truck driver “spends 56 minutes each day looking for places to park that are safe, where the driver can get the necessary rest time, and that 56 minutes a day translates into $4,600 annually in lost wages for that driver and for that company.”
The drivers’ lost wages and companies’ higher costs are the tip of this problem’s iceberg. The additional time spent searching for a space translates into greater congestion on roadways, increased emissions and more energy use. But the greatest concern is how the parking shortage may affect safety as fatigue may set in for drivers searching for parking.
Inadequate truck parking also factors into driver retention and recruitment. Many drivers look at certain routes and recognize the poor situation for truck parking in that traffic lane. This could be a reason they leave one company for another, where the routes don’t present that problem. How can we attract new people into trucking as drivers if we cannot provide the basic comfort of a safe place to rest?
According to the federal government and various state truck parking studies, there is inadequate truck parking in almost every state. Why has this problem occurred and grown? It’s simple: The drivers who use rest areas or need overnight truck parking facilities are not citizens of the state in which they need to park. No constituents in their districts are complaining about a lack of overnight truck parking — in fact, the opposite is occurring. We have areas where overnight truck parking was allowed for many years, but now local officials and citizens want them removed. In some cases, communities assess excessive fines to drivers for parking in locations that previously had allowed truck parking.
While the federal government has spent a great deal of time and resources studying and making rules on hours of service, the agencies — along with the states — have done little to provide the means by which drivers may comply with those rules. These governments have failed in their pledge to address this problem.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and others will point to various studies and policy statements about the importance of truck parking and their commitment to addressing the problem. But despite these pronouncements, the record, to date, has been a poor one. In reality, the situation has worsened rather than improved over the past several years.
Instead of aggressively working to create more spaces for truck parking or partnering with truck stops for additional parking in critical areas, much of the recent effort has been expended on technology solutions such as truck parking management systems. This technology delivers information to the driver in transit about availability of truck parking along certain routes. This concept is a good one; what’s missing is an adequate amount of truck parking. With the vast majority of truck stops and rest areas on key routes already filled each night, one can imagine these electronic systems constantly flashing that there is “no room at the inn.”
We may need to look for solutions outside of the box. One idea might be for states to partner with existing truck stops and purchase land adjacent to those facilities for additional parking. Second, the U.S. Department of Transportation and states should look to work with shippers and encourage them to allow overnight parking for truck drivers servicing their company. Third, we have many major facilities with substantial parking that may be used only intermittently.
For example, parking lots at sports stadiums — where thousands of parking spaces are not used every night. Why not see whether something could be worked out to use these existing facilities, or parts of parking lots at major shopping centers that are empty nightly? To make this happen would involve some investment by the state or federal government to provide a greater pavement base for a portion of a lot that may be used for truck parking, as well as some form of waiver of liability for the facility. The point is that there are solutions. We need to pursue them.
As a country, we owe it to the men and women who fuel our economy and drive our trucks daily over an increasingly challenging highway network to have the same comforts as the rest of us expect, which is a safe place to rest. It’s unfair to place them in a continuing “no-win” situation every evening, which places them and others at risk.
Empire Warehouse, a less-than-truckload carrier based in Denver, serves the Rocky Mountain region. Lee is American Trucking Associations’ vice president for Colorado, serves as chairman of ATA’s Agriculture and Food Transport Committee and is a member of ATA’s Safety Policy Committee. He also is a past chairman and current member of the Colorado Motor Carriers Association board of directors.
