Tiny Washington Town's Parking Woes Mirror Growing Nationwide Shortage
This story appears in the April 11 print edition of Transport Topics.
North Bend, the tiny picturesque town in central Washington where the popular 1990 television series “Twin Peaks” was filmed, is in the spotlight again — this time for Truck Town, a landmark since the 1940s.
The truck stop, just off of Interstate 90, has become a microcosm of a nationwide truck parking shortage that federal regulators say is a serious detriment to highway safety.
Nearly every day at Truck Town, now operated by TravelCenters of America, drivers angle for one of the 140 truck parking spaces that typically fill up by early afternoon, according to TA General Manager Primus Jayakody.
And when the parking facility is full, trucks park on the side of the road and on entrance and exit ramps, he added.
There seems to be no end in sight to the corridor’s truck parking shortage. For several years, city officials temporarily banned property owners from expanding Truck Town as well as developers from building new truck stops within the city limits.
Many letters from residents sent to the city characterizing trucks as noisy polluters that cause traffic congestion have touched a nerve among truckers, including dump truck operator Patrick Baker.
“Being a trucker is kind of like being a second-class citizen,” Baker told the council at a March 15 public hearing. “It’s a hard job, and people don’t respect the job.”
The TravelCenters truck stop is the only trucker oasis on the 100-mile-plus stretch of I-90 between Ellensburg and Seattle, a freight corridor that carries more than 10 million tons of goods annually, according to a 2014 freight mobility plan by the Washington State Department of Transportation. Now North Bend’s city council is jockeying to pass an ordinance that would turn the temporary ban into a permanent one.
This year, the council has convened public hearings and is on track to consider passing later this month the permanent ban that truckers and property owners say will only exacerbate a nationwide problem.
“Truck parking shortages are a national safety concern,” a 2015 Federal Highway Administration parking shortage study said. “An inadequate supply of truck parking spaces can result in two negative consequences: First, tired truck drivers may continue to drive because they have difficulty finding a place to park for rest and, second, truck drivers may choose to park at unsafe locations, such as on the shoulder of the road, exit ramps or vacant lots.”
Indeed, that has been the case in North Bend, where hundreds of truckers park anywhere they can during winter storms that close the notorious Snoqualmie Pass to traffic dozens of times each year, said Gaynel Gunderson, one of the owners of the Truck Town property leased to TA.
North Bend Mayor Ken Hearing and WSDOT Freight Systems Director Ron Pate did not return phone messages.
Sheri Call, vice president of government relations for Washington Trucking Associations, said her group has met several times with North Bend city officials, but to no avail.
“Unfortunately, this has been going on for probably greater than five years between the city and the residents and their desire to not be driving past a truck stop when they get off Exit 34,” Call told Transport Topics. “The truth is the truck stop that’s there is in such demand that there isn’t enough space for the trucks that want to park there.”
Call said that WSDOT recently began distributing a truck parking survey that will be used to draw up a statewide strategy.
When the American Transportation Research Institute unveiled in October its list of the top 10 critical issues facing the North American trucking industry the lack of available safe parking rose to No. 5.
Call said in Washington state, however, she’s convinced the crux of the truck parking shortage issue is related to the high cost of land in metro areas.
FHWA agrees.
“Rising real estate costs make it more difficult for highway-oriented retail uses that cater to truckers to compete with other, more profitable land uses in the vicinity of highway interchanges,” the agency’s parking study concluded.
For example, in North Bend, one of those retail competitors is the town’s premium outlet mall, Call said.
Earlier this year, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association took note of the controversy.
“Your proposal would not only disrupt the supply chain, it unnecessarily jeopardizes the safety of every motorist,” wrote Mike Matousek, OOIDA’s director of state legislative affairs. “Are trucks so unsightly that you’re willing to risk public safety?”
The proposed ordinance also has drawn threats of litigation from Seattle-area real estate developer Puget Western Inc., which said it has been approached with numerous proposals for commercial truck centers in North Bend.
“Due to the city’s moratorium, none of those proposals has come to fruition,” said a letter sent to the city written by Puget’s attorney.
