Anyone driving through the United States at night will notice the number of unused parking lots, yet American truckers are facing a shortage of safe places to park between destinations.
At best, this leads to irritation, lost time and lost money. At worst, it can lead to tragedies like the 2009 shooting death of Jason Rivenburg, who was forced to park at an abandoned gas station less than 15 miles from his destination. Numerous studies and reports since his death have all echoed the need for safe places to stop. With some creative thinking, logistics companies can actually work with local businesses and municipal governments to create safe places to park.
The truck parking problem is really a space problem. In rural regions, truckers have numerous options when it comes to resting for a few hours or pulling over for the night. However, this isn’t really viable in crowded, highly dense areas such as the Pacific Northwest, Northeast, Mid-Atlantic region and California. Any driver who has gone through Chicago or Dallas looking for a place to park knows this all too well.
One of the biggest issues is that rest stations and truck stops require a lot of land, which is in short supply in cities and the immediate suburbs. That’s why truck drivers will often have to make a round-trip of more than 100 miles with empty trailers just to park their trucks. This is a problem on a number of levels. For starters, it creates significant traffic issues in metropolitan areas as thousands of trucks take up space on the roads unnecessarily.
With the price of fuel today, the economic cost of wasted runs creates significant financial hardship for commercial carriers and that doesn’t even factor in environmental concerns as millions of miles are driven in diesel trucks every year solely to get drivers to a safe place top park. It really is the worst of all possible worlds and it doesn’t have to be this way.
Many studies highlight this problem for truckers. More than 75% of truck drivers and nearly 66% of logistics personnel regularly experience problems finding safe locations to rest, and 90% reported struggling to find safe parking during night hours – primarily during weekdays but also during weekend hours.
This influx of requests proves there is a problem. Thankfully the solution is well within reach.
