US truck parking enters its implementation era, and CPCS is helping lead the shift
CPCS is helping transportation agencies across the US build the bridge between documented need and delivered infrastructure.
America’s trucking industry has spent nearly a decade building the case that it doesn’t have enough safe places for drivers to park. The need for action is no longer in question, and actions are being taken at the federal, state, and local levels.
At a recent panel convened by the Mid America Association of State Transportation Officials (MAASTO), federal, state and local officials gathered to discuss what CPCS, a transportation advisory firm that has worked on truck parking strategy across America, calls the “delivery problem” which is the gap between plans and actually building the infrastructure.
“No single entity controls all of the levers needed to deliver truck parking, making intergovernmental coordination essential,” observed Jia Yuan, one of CPCS’s truck parking experts, in her opening.
It’s a modest-sounding statement with large implications. Federal agencies write the rules and hand out the money; states own the highways; regional planners control the zoning; and local governments, often, hold the veto. Addressing the shortage requires an unusual degree of coordination across all four levels of government.
Key takeaways
- Truck parking is entering “2.0.” The first generation of truck parking work focused on inventories, demand, hotspots, and prioritization. Increasingly, states and regions are asking the next question: How do we fund and deliver solutions?
- Federal support is becoming more tangible. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), an agency within the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) highlighted the growing use of existing formula and discretionary programs for truck parking, particularly the National Highway Freight Program, as well as the $200 million truck parking set-aside within the 2026 INFRA program. The panel also noted discussion around continuing dedicated truck parking funding through reauthorization.
- Better planning is creating a stronger investment pipeline. FHWA is already seeing more detailed truck parking information coming through State Freight Plans and their required commercial motor vehicle parking assessments. That creates a stronger connection between federally required planning, demonstrated need, and projects that can compete for funding.
- Solutions need to go beyond simply building rest area spaces. Minnesota is examining public capacity expansion, technology, public-private partnerships, warehouse staging, shared parking, and even parcel-level opportunities in the highest-demand areas.
- MPOs and local governments have an increasingly important implementation role. The experience of OKI, the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments, showed how regional data can lead to zoning changes, rest area investment, action plans, and ultimately construction funding… but also how local opposition and land-use decisions can determine whether solutions actually happen. Simply prohibiting undesignated parking doesn’t eliminate demand; it moves trucks somewhere else.
- Implementation doesn’t always require a major capital project. Delaware converting underutilized park-and-ride facilities for truck staging illustrates the potential to repurpose existing public assets relatively quickly. It also highlights the importance of monitoring, operations, enforcement, and industry communication after a solution opens.
This is precisely the terrain CPCS navigates with clients: balancing technical feasibility, land use realities, community engagement, and funding mechanics to get projects from concept to construction.
What this means for future truck parking investment
Put these examples together, and a pattern emerges. Truck parking is migrating from a planning exercise to an investment program, complete with the accountability that implies.
Federal money to address the need is becoming more available than it has been in years; states are beginning to commit their own; and the plans many wrote for compliance purposes are proving, somewhat to everyone’s surprise, genuinely useful.
The agencies most likely to benefit, according to CPCS, will be those that treat the process as a continuous pipeline — running from data, to priority locations, to feasible solutions, to project readiness, to funding, to construction — rather than as a series of disconnected exercises. That means identifying sites well before a grant deadline, resolving land ownership questions in advance, and cultivating the local political support that no amount of federal money can substitute for.
The panel’s underlying message was less about parking than about governance: infrastructure problems that cross jurisdictional lines rarely have single owners, and rarely have single solutions.
Truck parking, it turns out, is a useful test case for a much larger question for US infrastructure — whether federal money, state ambition and local consent can be made to move in the same direction.
CPCS, which has spent years helping transportation agencies answer exactly that question, argues that the states now building that coordination into their process will be the ones best placed to spend the money now, at last, on offer.
The next generation of successful truck parking programs will likely connect:
How CPCS helps US agencies get there
This is the work CPCS does every day: helping state DOTs, MPOs, and federal partners translate truck parking need into fundable, buildable, operable solutions. Our teams bring the cross-jurisdictional planning experience, feasibility and site evaluation expertise, funding strategy know-how, and implementation discipline required to move a truck parking program from documented priority to delivered infrastructure.
Dive into the presentation details here: MAASTO 2026 truck parking session presentations
You may also like
- Where freight depends on trucks in the US and what it means for decarbonization
- Future of trucking: electrified, platooned and automated
- New tool to help US transportation coalition curb truck bottlenecks
