Truck drivers must decide every day how they will break the law. Their choices are to illegally park on the side of the highway to rest or to look for a proper parking space and risk the consequences of driving beyond the federally mandated hours of service.
The United States has a truck parking space shortage, with one parking space for every 11 trucks on the road today, according to statistics from the American Trucking Associations (ATA).
“We’ve been dealing with this for at least 20 years. It just keeps getting worse, because not enough spaces are being added and there are more trucks on the road every day,” Darrin Roth, ATA vice president of highway policy told The Epoch Times.
By law, truckers must keep a digital log of their driving hours and rest times.
They are required to take a 30-minute rest break after continuously driving for eight hours. They have a 14-hour window to drive a maximum of 11 hours.
After that, there can be no driving until 10 consecutive hours off duty have elapsed, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
Drivers who violate the hours of service could be fined. In addition, it goes against their company’s safety score and the driver’s record.
The parking space shortage came up several times during a June 21 congressional hearing of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, during which Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg acknowledged the issue, calling it the No. 1 problem he hears about when speaking with truckers.
Mr. Buttigieg said the administration is working on it. So are some lawmakers.
The House Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee included a $200 million line item in a funding bill, dedicated to expanding the availability of truck parking.
States receive annual highway transportation funds, which can be used for truck parking, but it is not dedicated to this and often states choose to use the money on road works instead.
That is why Mr. Bost has for eight years put forward a bill that provides funding specifically for truck parking expansion.
Fewer Rest Areas
Ideally, states would expand the parking available at rest areas, industry leaders say.Often truck drivers pull into a rest area looking for a place to park and rest, but at certain hours all the spaces are full.
When that happens, often they park on the ramp at the rest area, other ramps, or the side of the road.
That can be dangerous, as lone truckers can become crime victims, and sometimes other drivers crash into the parked truck.
That is what happened in July 2023 when a Greyhound bus hit three trucks parked on an Interstate 70 exit ramp in southern Illinois.
Three people died and more than a dozen were seriously injured.
The tragedy underscores that the truck parking shortage is a public safety issue for all, not just a trucker’s problem, Mr. Roth said.
Rest areas are the best stop for drivers because there is safety in numbers, Mr. Bost told The Epoch Times. States used to have more rest areas, but have closed some down.
“They had a real problem in the rest areas in the 1970s and 1980s on up into the 1990s, with crime, robbery, prostitution, drug running, all of those things were happening at a lot of rest areas,” said Mr. Bost, who has worked in the trucking industry most of his life.
“Many states chose to close those rest areas down, which made parking worse.”
Sometimes, if states have a budget crunch, they shut rest areas down temporarily to save on the maintenance budget, Mr. Roth said.
The parking shortage is a national problem touching every state, with parking especially scarce just outside metropolitan areas.
Often truckers try to time their route to end near a city so they can rest overnight, and make their delivery early in the morning, before traffic gets too congested.
Because truckers spend some of their drive time searching for an open parking space, it diminishes productivity and costs them money.
According to the ATA, 98 percent of drivers regularly experience problems finding safe parking.
