Washington, D.C. — The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is moving forward with a national study titled “Quantifying the Benefits of Creating New Truck Parking Spaces” to calculate the exact economic and safety costs of the country's severe commercial vehicle capacity shortage. Published through a recent Federal Register notice under Docket No. FMCSA 2025 0787, the agency plans to submit an Information Collection Request to the White House to gather approximately one thousand completed surveys from working truck drivers.
Finding a secure place to park remains a daily hurdle for OTR truck driver professionals across the United States. While state departments of transportation and private facility operators work to expand infrastructure, federal regulators noted a distinct lack of precise monetary data proving the exact value of building new spots. Past research efforts failed to accurately capture critical operational habits, such as how often operators park in unauthorized areas, shut down their rigs early to secure a legal slot, or burn through hours of service limits while hunting for a safe space to rest.
The upcoming online questionnaire takes roughly twenty-five minutes to complete and will land in the inboxes of several thousand commercial vehicle operators nationwide. Regulators intend to pair the resulting data with existing research to estimate the financial value of adding capacity across different freight corridors. Key areas of measurement include lowering carrier operating expenses, improving driver well-being, and reducing highway crashes. The agency is currently accepting public feedback on the survey design through regulations.gov for a sixty-day comment window.
What This Means for Drivers
For independent owner-operators and company drivers alike, this federal initiative directly targets the daily friction points that complicate trip planning and eat into weekly earnings. CDL-A driver professionals lose productive hours every single week searching for safe facilities, which frequently forces tough choices between violating federal hours-of-service rules or parking on dangerous highway shoulders and exit ramps. By participating in this data collection effort, working drivers have a direct channel to inform federal policymakers who ultimately shape FMCSA regulations and infrastructure funding priorities.
Industry Reaction
The severe shortage of safe commercial vehicle resting spaces has remained a top concern for the trucking sector for years. According to benchmark research reports from the American Transportation Research Institute, the parking crisis ranked as the second-biggest industry worry in 2023 and 2024, and sat at the number four spot this year. While trucking companies hiring new staff often hear complaints about facility availability from recruits, this new federal push aims to translate those daily frustrations into hard numbers that can justify large-scale public and private infrastructure investments.
Key Points
- The FMCSA submitted an Information Collection Request to the White House for a national study titled “Quantifying the Benefits of Creating New Truck Parking Spaces.”
- The agency aims to collect about one thousand usable survey responses from working drivers across the country.
- Public comments on the proposal are open for sixty days under Docket No. FMCSA 2025 0787 at regulations.gov.
- The research measures specific metrics including crash reductions, carrier cost decreases, and driver well-being.
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