American truck drivers face a chronic headache: finding a parking spot

In the early hours of one night in July, a Greyhound bus bound for St. Louis turned onto an exit leading to a rest stop in southern Illinois and struck three parked tractor-trailers, smashing the front end, crumpling the roof and destroying part was torn off the car. his side.

Three passengers were killed. The tractors were parked along the shoulder of the driveway, a common sight on the country’s highways.

“It’s scary because it can happen in the blink of an eye,” said Carmen Anderson, 64, a truck driver from South Dakota for America’s Service Line, who recently had to park on an off-ramp in North Carolina after being unable to park. to find parking spaces at rest areas or truck stops.

The accident in Illinois highlighted a widespread complaint among the nation’s truck drivers: parking spaces for commercial trucks are difficult to find.

As a result, truck drivers often take refuge in store parking lots, along the sides of highways, and on ramps, although the legality of this varies by location. The shortage of parking spaces is both inconvenient and financially costly for truck drivers, and can lead to dangerous situations when truck drivers are forced to improvise.

Federal transportation officials and lawmakers are trying to provide truck drivers with some relief. Under the Biden administration, the Department of Transportation has awarded tens of millions of dollars to projects across the country to build more truck parking spaces, and a bipartisan proposal in Congress would allocate hundreds of millions more to address the problem.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the lack of parking was one of the top issues he heard about from truckers. In an interview, Mr. Buttigieg said the Greyhound bus crash was a reminder of the urgent need to address the problem.

“People who are not even part of the trucking industry lost their lives in a scenario that was affected by the trucks that were on the ramp,” Mr. Buttigieg said. “It is not that the drivers in the driveway are careless when it comes to safety. It’s that they don’t feel like they have a better choice.”

To illustrate the shortage, the trucking industry cites a skewed statistic: nationwide, there is one truck parking spot for every eleven truck drivers. An industry survey found that drivers typically sacrificed about an hour a day to find a parking space. That loss of driving time amounts to about $5,500 a year in lost income, or a 12 percent pay cut, according to the American Trucking Associations, a trade group.

Long-haul truck drivers typically sleep in their cabs, and the struggle for parking is driven in part by federal safety rules on how long drivers can sit behind the wheel before stopping to rest. In the past, truck drivers kept paper time records, which allowed them to get around the rules if they couldn’t find a parking spot at the exact time they needed to take a break. But a federal rule that took full effect in 2019 forced truck drivers to switch to an electronic system that uses a digital time log. Truck drivers can be penalized if they do not start their break on time.

“Finding a place to park where you’re safe, where your vehicle is safe, and finding that parking space in a reasonable amount of time so that it doesn’t cost you compensation is ultimately difficult,” said Dean Key, 56, a truck driver from Holstein, Iowa.

Todd Spencer, president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, which represents truck drivers, said trucking companies and drivers have been pressing the federal government for more than two decades to address the lack of parking.

Mr Spencer said pressure increased in 2009 after a truck driver named Jason Rivenburg was shot dead during a robbery while parked at an abandoned gas station in South Carolina. Mr. Rivenburg had arrived early to deliver a load of milk and needed somewhere to park for the night.

Out of tragedy came Jason’s law passed by Congress in 2012 as part of a broader transportation bill and required the federal government to assess the availability of truck parking spaces in each state. Despite relentless campaigns over the years to increase the number of parking spaces across the country, not much progress has been made.

“Drivers are increasingly finding themselves in situations where there is no right choice, so you try to make the least bad choice you can,” Mr Spencer said.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers from both parties have pressed in recent years to address the problem. Funding for truck parking was included in an infrastructure bill passed by the House of Representatives in 2021, but the provision did not make it into the Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure measure, which became law later that year.

This year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers resubmitted a bill called the Truck Parking Safety Improvement Act, which would provide $755 million over three years to build more truck parking spaces.

In an interview, one of the sponsors, Rep. Mike Bost, an Illinois Republican whose family owns a trucking company, pointed to a federal survey in which nearly all truck drivers reported having trouble finding a safe parking spot. Mr. Bost’s grandfather founded Bost Truck Service in Murphysboro, Illinois, in 1935, and Mr. Bost later drove trucks himself and managed the company’s operations for a decade.

“This is not just for the safety of your company driver,” Mr Bost said. “Most of the time it’s a non-commercial driver who normally hits them.”

During the Biden administration, the Transportation Department has awarded several grants to fund the construction of truck parking lots across the country, such as $23 million to build a commercial truck travel plaza in Caldwell County, Texas, in the region between Austin and San Antonio. Other grants include $23 million to add 125 new parking spaces along Interstate 40 east of Nashville and $15 million to add 120 spaces along the Interstate 4 corridor between Tampa and Orlando in Florida.

In September, Mr. Buttigieg visited a newly expanded rest area outside Salem, SD, along Interstate 90, which runs from Seattle to Boston. In 2021, the Department of Transportation awarded a $62 million grant to South Dakota to renovate a 28-mile stretch of highway. One aspect of the project was the construction of new parking spaces for trucks.

Flanked by tractor-trailers, Mr. Buttigieg called truck parking “a matter of life and death,” citing the killing of Mr. Rivenburg, and said his department had encouraged states to tap infrastructure funding to build more spaces. During the stop, he and his team also met about a dozen truck drivers over donuts and coffee.

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the Illinois crash involving the Greyhound bus. It is also reviewed a fatal crash in Oregon in May in which a tractor-trailer struck a van carrying farm workers parked on a highway shoulder, pushing it into another tractor-trailer also parked there. Seven people in the van were killed, as was the driver of the first tractor-trailer has been indicted for manslaughter and other charges.

After completion of the investigation, the Dutch Safety Board will make recommendations. The Transportation Department and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration can then use these recommendations to prevent similar accidents.

In the meantime, Lori Ann Barber, who lost her father this summer in a crash involving a parked tractor-trailer, is coping with the death of a loved one while hoping the government would address the truck parking shortage.

In July, Ms. Barber’s father, Mario Gonzalez, was driving on a highway south of San Antonio when he entered an exit that led to a rest stop. He “could not control his speed,” according to the Texas Highway Patrol, and his Ford F-150 pickup struck a parked tractor-trailer. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

The crash occurred around 10 p.m., and Robert C. Hilliard, the family’s attorney, said the tractor-trailer was parked without cones or lights that Mr. Gonzalez could see. Mr. Hilliard said he believed Mr. Gonzalez thought he was driving on the highway instead of taking an exit.

Mr. Gonzalez’s family is suing the trucking company whose tractor-trailer was parked on the off-ramp. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

“We want change,” Ms. Barber said. “We want safety, and we don’t want anyone else to die the way our father died.”