When Desiree Wood moved to Henderson, Nevada, in 2020, she expected her new home to be surrounded by desert land and mountains. What she found instead was trucks — a lot of them — parked all over vacant Bureau of Land Management lots.

That’s because of the glut of warehouses in Henderson, a Las Vegas suburb. One warehouse services Levi Strauss. Another belongs to Smith’s, a grocery chain owned by Kroger. The biggest warehouse complex is Amazon. So truck drivers flock to Henderson, shuttling jeans, grocery orders and Amazon packages to and fro. Wood was a full-time truck driver from 2007 to 2019, and she said she didn’t mind the trucks aplenty.

There are publicly owned rest areas and big travel centers, of course. But truck drivers usually struggle to find spots; almost half of commercial truck stops operate at more than 100% capacity on weeknights. Then, there’s the fact that truckers might wait overnight to load or unload at warehouses that don’t let them park there.

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Tricks aside, there’s long been a truck parking crisis. Since as early as 1991, the trucking industry has been disquieted about lack of parking, citing it as a contributor to driver fatigue. The ATA said there are 11 truck drivers for every one parking space. In 2009, truck driver Jason Rivenburg was killed after parking overnight at an abandoned gas station. He was unable to park at the warehouse where he was scheduled to deliver a load of milk. Jason’s Law, enacted as a provision of a larger 2012 transportation bill, required the federal government to study each state’s truck parking abilities and authorized more highway funds for truck parking.

But another portion of that 2012 bill actually heightened issues around truck parking. The electronic logging device mandate now universally enforces the decades-old hours-of-service rules, which many drivers had skirted for years with paper logbooks. The electronic logs, though, mandate that drivers follow the HOS rules, which allow for 11 hours of driving after 10 consecutive hours off duty. This meant drivers, who may have before broken up their sleeping and driving schedules, suddenly found themselves roughly in alignment with each other on when to shut down and get some sleep, according to a letter from the American Economic Liberties Project.

And if you happen to find good parking before your HOS clock runs out, Wood said truck drivers risk getting a call from their dispatchers telling them to keep hustling. For that matter, drivers might push it anyway, because they’re paid by mile not per hour. That could result in drivers parking in unsafe areas.

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