Truck Drivers Circle for 1-2 Hours Nightly Searching for Legal Parking

Long-haul truck drivers in the United States routinely spend 60 to 120 minutes every evening driving in circles looking for a legal, safe place to park their 53-foot trailer for their federally mandated 10-hour rest break. The shortage is not hypothetical -- FHWA estimates a national deficit of over 100,000 truck parking spaces, and drivers report that after 7 PM on weekdays, virtually every rest area and truck stop on major corridors like I-81, I-95, and I-10 is completely full. The downstream consequence is devastating to driver economics. Those 1-2 hours of circling are unpaid -- drivers on per-mile pay earn nothing while searching for parking, effectively cutting their daily income by 10-15%. Over a year, a driver earning $0.55/mile who loses 90 minutes of productive driving daily forfeits roughly $12,000-$15,000 in annual income. This is a major reason the trucking industry faces a chronic driver shortage: the job already pays poorly per hour worked, and unpaid parking searches make it worse. The problem persists because the cost is externalized onto individual drivers rather than borne by shippers, carriers, or infrastructure planners. Shippers schedule tight delivery windows that force drivers to arrive at specific times, but provide no staging areas. Carriers optimize routes for fuel and miles, not for parking availability. And state DOTs treat truck parking as a low-priority capital project because trucks don't vote in local elections. The result is a coordination failure where no single party has sufficient incentive to solve the problem, so 3.5 million drivers absorb the cost every night.