Connon D.Wolf
Government funding and private sector investment are both playing a role in the trucking industry’s efforts to alleviate the truck parking shortage, a major source of lost productivity and driver frustration.
The American Transportation Research Institute ranked truck parking as the No. 2 concern among drivers in 2025. ATRI also found in an earlier report that drivers sacrificed 56 minutes every day on average to secure parking at a cost of $5,600 annually.
“This has been an issue for a long time, for decades really,” said Darrin Roth, vice president of highway policy for American Trucking Associations. “It’s getting worse and worse because the miles traveled by trucks keep growing, and the number of spaces nationwide isn’t growing fast enough to accommodate those drivers. So, in a nutshell, that’s the problem.”
ATA advocates for federal investment through the issuance of grants, though Roth stressed that it’s a multifaceted issue between safety concerns and economic costs that requires different solutions.
“The private sector has stepped up as well,” Roth said. “Traditionally, the private sector has only provided capacity through truck stops. But the last few years, we’ve seen a whole bunch of companies pop up.”
Roth noted that these businesses don’t always have facilities or amenities. Instead, they leverage technology such as apps to connect drivers to a guaranteed a spot. Still, they are seen as an important part of the overall parking ecosystem..
“It’s so new and so organic that I don’t know that anyone has really been able to get a handle on exactly how much new capacity it’s provided,” Roth said. “But from what I’ve seen, this is the fastest-growing source of new truck parking capacity over the last few years.”
Truck Parking Club connects drivers and fleet managers with properties that have parking. The app also contains information about the property, its features and what amenities are offered. The properties are inspected to confirm they are suitable for trucks, and the information is updated through multiple inspections.
“We believe for trucking and the supply chain to be most efficient, we think there’s over a million spaces needed across the U.S.,” Truck Parking Club CEO Evan Shelley said. “It’s costing the industry, from our commissioned research, over $100 billion a year, and that’s just because of the inefficiencies of drivers not having suitable parking close to them.”
Truck Parking Club has grown its network of providers to more than 6,000 locations. These include warehouses, terminals, repair shops, self-storage facilities and truck stops, with options for fleet manager, dispatcher or driver to reserve a spot.
“It’s all within the same account,” Shelley said. “We’ve really built all the tools needed to be successful with all things truck parking, not just providing the optionality.”
Shelley welcomes taxpayer-funded parking as a way to help address the issue, but he stressed the government alone can’t scale fast enough to fix the problem, so private-sector services are necessary.
“In 3½ years, we’ve built the largest aggregation of truck parking spaces in the U.S.,” Shelley said. “We do think we are a big part of the solution, and we don’t just think that, we have the drivers and carriers to prove it. We’ve parked hundreds of thousands of trucks.”
Trucker Path has provided crowdsourced parking availability updates since it launched in 2013. A few years later, predictive data features were added. This allowed users to rate parking in real time for other drivers. The company later leveraged the resulting large network by adding a reserved parking feature to the app in June 2026.
“A lot of time is wasted looking for spaces at the end of the day, and a lot of drivers end up having to park somewhere where it’s not the safest,” said Trucker Path Chief Marketing Officer Chris Oliver. “But 50-plus minutes a day is a massive chunk of the driver’s available hours on a daily basis. So having good parking is a big problem.”
Trucker Path has more than 100,000 reservable truck parking spots across the United States. The recent update integrated overnight and long-term paid booking options in addition to its traditional crowdsourced free parking availability maps. The approach allows the company to work with partners to overlay its own booking service over existing apps and storefronts.
“The private sector is not funded by tax dollars,” Oliver said. “There are costs involved in the private sector that have to get covered somehow. I think it has to be done. Otherwise, like I said, I don’t think the public sector can scratch that itch fully.”
