By DAVID CLOUSTON
Salina Journal
After a hard day on the road, when he physically and legally needs a rest, trucker Michael Brown often finds it challenging to find a place to park his rig.
Especially after 7 p.m., he said, truck stop parking lots often are filled with idling 18-wheelers. Ditto for parking spaces at roadside rest areas. Sometimes he's camped along an Interstate highway exit or entrance ramp.
"They're just going to have to build more truck stops," said Brown, who was found recently taking a break in Salina at Bosselman Travel Center. For three years he's been a driver for Express, Denver, hauling meat.
Drivers required to rest
Rest breaks are mandated by federal law, which requires drivers to pull over after logging 11 hours behind the wheel and relax for 10 hours.
But pull over where?
Jeff Chaney, manager of Bosselman's, said his parking lot often is jammed.
"Usually by sundown, we're pretty full up," he said.
The number of places trucks can park isn't keeping pace nationally with the growth in trucking. The most current figures available from the American Trucking Associations show that there were 2.7 million tractor-trailers rigs cruising the nation's highways in 2004. Their drivers logged a total of 117.8 billion miles.
David Flynn, driver for Southern Refrigerated Transport, Texarkana, Ark., said he's had good luck finding a place to park his rig in Salina, which has several truck stops because it is at the junction of two Interstate highways.
But the challenge of finding truck parking was evident in a 2002 study published by the Federal Highway Administration. It identified Kansas as one of 23 states that don't have enough truck parking spaces at public facilities, such as truck stops. Kansas avoided the list of 12 states with the most acute parking problems only because of its private truck parking, such as the lot Great Plains Trucking has at 1935 E. North to accommodate the company's 100 trailers and 60 tractors.
Half of the company's drivers haul Great Plains and Landpride machinery; the others haul a variety of goods for other companies, said trucking president Sherwin Fast.
He said truck parking is hardest to find in California and other congested areas.
"Where land values are high, you tend to have less parking spaces," he said.
Indeed, California is one of the 12 states on the Federal Highway Administration's list of states with the biggest parking problems.
The others are Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio, Texas and Washington. That report counted an estimated 315,850 parking spaces in public rest areas, travel plazas and private truck stops along the national highway system. That's one parking spot for every 8Ôªø1รขÑ2 trucks on the road.
Nationwide shortage
A 2005 study by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration found that only 34 percent of drivers surveyed said they "almost always" or "frequently" can find parking spots at truck stops, and only 11 percent said they similarly could find parking at highway rest areas.
Marvin Harrison, a driver for Jim Palmer Trucking of Salina, said he sometimes drives at night because it's easier to pull over and find a place to rest during the day.
"A lot of times, about 2, 3 a.m., spaces open up at truck stops," he said. "The drivers have their 10 hours off and they start driving again."
Harrison, 68, has driven for 27 years. He hauls food products, mainly for Tony's Pizza and the Schwan Food Company.
Drivers sometimes try to time their routes to get to areas where parking is more plentiful, but often their schedule is at the mercy of shippers.
Jim Lennox, manager of Jim Palmer Trucking's Salina terminal, said shippers have deadlines.
"When you book the load, they tell you what time you have to be there. A lot of times you'll have to meet another truck in route, and transfer the load to get it delivered on time," he said.
When parking lots are full and their logbooks demand that they rest, drivers seek the best alternative.
"You grab a ditch, you park pretty much wherever you can," said truck driver David Lee of Grantsburg, Wis., who for 13 years has driven for Western Star Transport.
"Last night I slept in a Wal-Mart parking lot," he said during a stop in Salina on his way to Los Angeles with a load of refrigerated egg products. "I was lucky enough it was a small town so they didn't mind. I was out of hours, so I needed to stop."
Chain stores in bigger cities frequently have security guards to keep truckers from parking overnight, he said.
Parking trucks along shoulders and highway ramps overnight isn't legal in Kansas, and ticketed drivers face a $30 fine plus court costs. Usually, however, troopers simply ask drivers to move along to a safer location, said Lt. John Eichorn of the Kansas Highway Patrol in Topeka.
If the driver is maxed out on hours a trooper might help him arrange to fine another way to move the rig, but Eichorn said such an occurrence is rare.
"We work with a lot of truck drivers every day," he said. "The main thing is we just don't want to see anyone getting hurt."
Efforts are underway to address the parking problem. Congress has authorized increased funding to help states and communities to build more truck parking, and some states such as Massachusetts and Virginia are eyeing technology to help guide drivers to available parking places.
Darrin Roth, director of highway operations for the American Trucking Associations, said one system under review would have a sensor in the pavement of the parking lot to detect whether a truck is there. If not, truckers could be alerted, perhaps by cell phone, to the vacancy. Another system would similarly use cameras.
All that's happening now is testing to see if the technology is feasible, he said.
"Until those tests are done and they analysis is complete, it's difficult to know when it might become widespread," Roth said. "We like it. We see it as a way of relieving some of the problems out there."
n Reporter David Clouston can be reached at 822-1403 or by e-mail at dclouston@salina.com.
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