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Arkansas Trucking Association Highlights Parking Problem

4 min read

The Arkansas Trucking Association’s annual conference begins May 3 at the Hammons Center in Rogers.

One of the guest presenters scheduled to make a presentation at the three-day conference — it’s really two days of trucking stuff and one day of golf — is Rebecca Brewster, the president and chief operating officer of the American Transportation Research Institute. The ATRI is the nonprofit research organization for the American Trucking Associations, and the ATRI recently published the results of its Truck Parking Diaries survey.

In 2015, the ATRI named “managing critical truck parking” as its most important research topic. To that end, the ATRI canvassed drivers who volunteered to keep diaries for 14 days during their travels to detail their parking experiences.

Finding safe, quality parking is harder than you would think. Imagine the millions of trucks on the road and then realize that there are a little more than 300,000 public and private parking spots allotted for them.

A vast majority of those spots are at private facilities. Public rest areas — once a haven for tired truck drivers — have diminished as many states have closed them to save money.

A 2015 report by the Federal Highway Administration revealed that approximately three-fourths of the 8,000 drivers surveyed said they had problems finding a place to park at night. More than half of the states have public parking shortages, and the main freight corridors and urban areas that have the most parking also have the most demand so there is still an acute shortage.

Why does this matter? Well, a truck driver can’t (legally) pull off on the side of the road and take his or her required 10-hour break. Many public rest areas have a two-hour limit on parking so a truck driver can’t use that for his or her entire break, either.

“It’s such a significant problem for the industry,” Brewster said.

Brewster said the ATRI’s diary initiative was well-received by drivers, who apparently were eager to share their parking misery with someone who cared. Then some of them backed out for a reason that surprised Brewster.

“We had a lot of drivers express interest in doing these diaries because it is such a big problem,” Brewster said. “A lot of drivers [didn’t send in their diaries] because they said, ‘I have my own secret places where I park, and I don’t want to out it by this research. I’m not going to let other trucks start to fill it up.’”

According to the ATRI, truck parking is the fourth-most important industry issue among drivers; in 2011, it didn’t even rank in the top 10.

The ATRI diary project received 148 submissions for the period between June and September 2016. It covered more than 2,000 total days and 4,700 individual stops.

The ATRI’s report breaks down the percentage of male and female drivers surveyed as well as the geography, work schedule and sector. I won’t bore you with all the details, but it was clearly an attempt to cover a variety of different driver metrics.

One of the most revealing parts of the report is one that Brewster knew anecdotally. Drivers, in their anxiety to find a safe, legal place to park, were cutting short their drive time significantly to look for parking.

Nearly 40 percent of drivers cut their drive time by at least 30 minutes, and 32 percent cut it by at least one hour. The ATRI did some math and estimated that parking early cost each driver an average of 9,300 miles and $4,600 in pay a year.

“This finding actually quantified a time and an amount to how frequently drivers will stop early because they’re afraid they won’t find parking down the road,” Brewster said. “‘I still have two hours left on my drive clock, but I’m not going to risk it and keep going when I know there is a spot here.’ It really does have a productivity impact on the trucking industry.”


The ATA Conference will also have presentation on state of the industry by Chris Spear, who was elected CEO of the American Trucking Associations in July. Spear is no stranger to Arkansas; he was the legislative director for U.S. Sen. Tim Hutchinson, R-Ark., from 2000-01, and was a speaker at the Arkansas Trucking Association’s annual meeting in 2015 in Hot Springs.

Mike Cammisa, the American Trucking Associations’ vice president of safety, policy and connectivity, will give a presentation on autonomous truck policy. That is relevant to Arkansas, which recently passed a law that would allow platooning with two or more driver-assistive trucks on state highways.

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