On this episode of Taking The Hire Road, Jeremy Reymer, CEO of DriverReach, is joined by Evan Shelley, co-founder and CEO of Truck Parking Club, a platform connecting truck drivers with available parking spaces.
Every day across the U.S., while truck drivers are hundreds or thousands of miles from home, they spend precious time looking for a safe place to pull over to rest.
Truckers consistently point to parking as one of their top pain points. For carriers, though, alleviating this problem for drivers has traditionally been something they have little control over.
Solving the parking issue is exactly what Truck Parking Club has been doing since its launch just under a year ago. With just a few taps on a screen, truckers can find parking near their locations across the country and seamlessly reserve their spots on a nightly or monthly basis with no transaction fees. This also means they have a place to park a trailer, which might be advantageous for them to accept loads they might not have otherwise been able to take.
“You’d be surprised how often we meet someone at a truck show and they’re like, ‘Man, I would have made X number of thousands of dollars if I had known about you last week, because I could have dropped a trailer there, ran that load and came back and got the trailer,’” Shelley said.
With Truck Parking Club, drivers have access to almost 150 locations across the U.S., and even some in Canada and Mexico. Drivers can also see free rest areas and truck stop locations, which is a feature that rolled out just a few weeks ago.
Carriers can encourage drivers to use Truck Parking Club to help make truckers’ lives on the road a little easier.
“I think it’s something great a carrier can mention to drivers that they’re going to have just another way to pre-trip, plan ahead, reserve ahead, to have another spot to drop a trailer,” Shelley added.
Truck Parking Club is a value add for both sides of the market. In addition to linking drivers with parking spaces, it also helps landowners monetize their empty properties. Those properties can be anything from trucking companies with extra space to storage companies, trailer leasing companies, home builders with big yards or anywhere else trucks can park.
Property owners don’t pay to post listings, can quickly set up their profiles and aren’t subject to lease commitments, Shelley added. All the while, there is a great chance they will be able to earn extra income from monetizing their otherwise vacant land.
Truck Parking Club’s solution wasn’t always how Shelley intended to break into the world of truck parking. Back in 2021, he had acquired a piece of property zoned industrial that he wished to develop into truck parking but was met with roadblocks from the city government. Shelley realized acquiring land to dedicate to truck parking, and scaling this operation, would be long and difficult. But the parking problem wasn’t going to wait.
Though, admittedly, he dismissed the idea of Truck Parking Club at first, he soon realized that using technology to connect drivers with preexisting space made the most sense.
Similar to how app-based rental property listings changed how people book accommodations when traveling, Truck Parking Club has also changed the traditional means of finding parking. As the platform grows, it has the potential to alleviate the parking problem for drivers across the country.
“Truckers aren’t used to booking truck parking at a carrier’s location on the other side of the U.S., but now we’re starting to educate truckers that it is possible and it works and it’s seamless,” Shelley said.
Click here to learn more about Truck Parking Club.
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How St. Christopher Truckers Relief Fund supports truckers and their families
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Safeguarding trucking’s reputation and compliance
The post Solving the parking puzzle: Truck Parking Club’s win-win approach — Taking The Hire Road appeared first on FreightWaves.
