Developing a Guide for Truck Parking Information Management Systems (2025)
Chapter: 1 Introduction
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Safe and efficient freight movement depends on sufficient and strategically located truck parking. Federal hours of service (HOS) regulations require drivers to take breaks at defined intervals, leading to a search for parking ahead of their allowable drive time expires or while staging for their pick-up and delivery slots. This results in lost productivity, higher shipping costs, safety, and environmental impacts of circulating trucks, and increased congestion. Capacity, accessibility, and availability impact drivers’ ability to find parking in good time. Capacity represents the number of authorized spaces to park at parking lots (the supply). Accessibility represents the ease of access which is often measured by travel time, congestion, and distance, for a driver to reach a parking lot. Availability represents the remainder of truck parking capacity that is not used by other trucks (the demand) and is a highly variable factor that creates the truck parking problem. Simply put, truck drivers do not know whether an upcoming truck parking lot will have available spaces for them, and with limited truck parking capacity in the system, it is extremely challenging to predict how many spaces will be available when needed.
State Departments of Transportation (DOT) have utilized Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) for decades to provide motorists with key information to help them make informed travel decisions, such as avoiding congestion, awareness of a crash, or inclement travel conditions. Additionally, parking availability systems have existed for an equally prolonged period in other applications—specifically, parking garages at airports, shopping malls, and stadiums have been using these systems to inform customers of available parking in a crowded facility.
A fusion of ITS and parking availability systems created the concept of Truck Parking Information Management Systems (TPIMS), where truck parking infrastructure is equipped with parking monitoring systems that can assess near real-time availability and publish results to truck drivers. By reporting near real-time availability, it allowed truck drivers to make assessments of parking availability and informed route decisions.
This document covers the research efforts and outcomes for the project. This research report is divided into the following sections that align with the project research efforts:
- The TPIMS Information Review section discusses the research reviewed. It summarizes work undertaken early in the project to gather and review available information about TPIMS and highlights key findings that contribute to the Guide.
- The TPIMS Practices section defines and identifies TPIMS practices. It summarizes the research on approaches to implementing TPIMS. It covers policy, planning, facility types, and methods for detecting, processing, and distributing availability information.
- The Guide Development section summarizes the Guide for TPIMS. This section summarizes key findings and provides an overview of each chapter.
- The Summary and Recommended Research section provides brief concluding remarks and suggestions for next steps.
