Opinion: Looking for a Parking Space . . . And a Little Rest
Steve Koch is still shaking his head. A few weeks ago, the burly truck driver received a $60 ticket from a state trooper in scenic southwestern Virginia because he tried to obey a federally mandated driving rule.
Koch, 57, was driving his tractor-trailer along Interstate 81 early in the morning on Aug. 11 when he realized he needed to take a break to comply with Department of Transportation rules limiting commercial truck drivers to a maximum of 10 consecutive hours behind the wheel.
The Elkins, W.Va., native pulled into a rest area in historic Smyth County, slipped into a parking slot and turned off his motor.
Several hours later, he heard a sharp rap on his side window. A state trooper handed him a ticket totaling $60 for overstaying the rest area’s two-hour nighttime parking limit. Still sleepy, Koch wrote out a check, started his rig and eased back into the endless stream of traffic.
Koch’s plight is not unusual. A recent study done for DOT shows that 42% of the nation’s 1,487 rest areas restrict the hours truck drivers may actually stop and rest. Most of those post a two-hour limit, although some allow trucks a four-hour berth.
Neither restriction allows drivers to comply with the controversial hours-of-service rule, which has not been altered since it was created in 1939 — an era when trucks lacked today’s state-of-the-art braking and suspension systems, air conditioning, power steering and computerized mapping systems.
Under today’s rules, drivers can be at the wheel for a 10-hour stretch and work another five hours loading or unloading freight before being required to take eight hours off.
The DOT study was completed by Apogee Research, a leading traffic research firm. Its survey looked at 1,307 of the public rest areas and found they had a total of only 24,697 parking spaces set aside for trucks — leaving a staggering shortfall of 28,412 truck parking spaces at public rest areas.
Truck safety, it should be noted, is improving much faster than automobile safety. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration records show that the rate of fatal accidents involving commercial trucks dropped by 31% over the past decade, even though the miles traveled by trucks increased by more than 40%.
Still, rousting tired truckers from public rest areas because of some bureaucrat’s decision to impose arbitrary time requirements does not sound like a brilliant safety policy. Neither does drastically under-supplying the number of truck parking slots at public rest areas, in essence forcing many tired truckers to “keep on trucking” while looking for a safe haven to revitalize themselves.
The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, after surveying 2,000 drivers, concluded the parking shortage had reached “epidemic” proportions.
More than 90% of the drivers had difficulty finding parking spaces in public rest areas at least once a week, while 25% had problems three times a week. Even when drivers successfully found slots at rest areas, three-quarters said they had been awakened by state troopers and sent packing, even when it put them in violation of the federal hours-of-service rules.
One of the worst offenders is Virginia, where state police are under strict orders to enforce the short-term parking rules at Interstate rest stops. The state’s 40 rest areas currently have only 966 spaces available for truckers, a shortfall of 1,366 spaces. Ironically, Rep. Frank Wolf, a Republican from Virginia, is leading a crusade to transfer federal jurisdiction from the Federal Highway Administration to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Wolf, however, has been strangely silent about extending the hours that truck drivers may rest at Virginia truck stops, nor has he called for more funding to increase the number of parking slots for truckers.
Providing additional federal dollars is an obvious and quick solution to the problem. The total federal funding for rest area modifications, renovations and new construction has averaged a paltry $42 million a year since 1991.
The DOT study projects the cost of eliminating the rest-area shortfall of truck parking spaces at between $489 million and $629 million over a 10-year span, or $48.9 million to $62.9 million a year.
By federal standards, that’s a pittance. It’s an investment that the most affluent nation on earth can easily afford to make, particularly during boom times. It’s time for Congress and especially red-hot safety advocates like Wolf to stand up and be counted.
They can help reduce the nation’s declining traffic fatality toll even more by providing truckers with adequate parking at Interstate rest areas, the only “room at the inn” many truckers are likely to encounter as they deliver the nation’s goods.
