Truck Parking Club doubles network in under 6 months

Chattanooga, Tennessee-based Truck Parking Club recently announced it has surpassed 2,000 property member locations nationwide, a doubling of its footprint in six months. Part of the growth came from targeting diverse property types, from trucking companies and repair shops to storage facilities and real estate investors. 

“This isn’t just about hitting a number – it’s about solving a decades-old problem that costs the trucking industry billions annually,” said Evan Shelley, co-founder and CEO of Truck Parking Club, in a press release. “Every new location means drivers spend less time searching and more time earning. Our goal is clear: reduce parking search time to under 10 minutes per day.”

The rapid expansion and milestone followed an announcement in February of the addition of industry veteran Brent Hutto as chief relationship officer, the position he formerly held at Truckstop. Part of the push is to build on driver momentum and turn it into enterprise-level relationships. 

Reed Loustalot, chief marketing officer at Truck Parking Club, said in an earlier interview with FreightWaves, “Truck Parking Club grew organically and doing that we coincidentally have drivers in 60 of the top 100 fleets booking parking with us, and we have never talked to the fleets directly about having their drivers use our app. It’s their drivers, their dispatchers and their fleet managers finding us.”

Another advantage of being a truck parking aggregator is it’s less expensive and turns otherwise unused parking locations into income production opportunities. Shelley wrote, “New truck parking construction typically costs $100,000-$200,000 per space and takes years to complete, while Truck Parking Club can activate existing spaces within a day.”

Looking ahead to the next milestone, the company is setting its sights on 10,000 locations. 

Transportation metrics hold steady in May LMI data

The Logistics Managers’ Index’s recently released May data showed a second consecutive month of expansion. The May LMI came in at 59.4 points, up 0.6 points from 58.8 in April. The m/m increase was impacted by inventories, which saw higher costs and slower movement compared to earlier in the year. The LMI is a diffusion index, with a score above 50 signaling expansion, while below 50 is a contraction. 

The interplay between warehousing costs and inventory levels was a big theme in May. Warehouse capacity fell 5.4 points in May to 50, while warehousing prices rose 0.2 points to 72.1, a strong expansion. “This suggests that the inventories that were rushed into the country earlier this year are now static and holding them is expensive,” noted the report.

The LMI transportation metrics were mostly stale, with movement less than 1 point. There were some nuances, according to the report. Capacity dipped slightly to 54.7, with upstream firms facing tighter space at 50 points compared to downstream firms’ expansion of 65.3 points. Transportation prices rose more for downstream (66.7) than upstream (61.7), but the gap wasn’t significant. Transportation utilization fell to 52.6 points, the lowest since November 2023. Despite lower diesel prices ($3.487 a gallon), a predicted import surge could stress intermodal and over-the-road networks, testing supply chain flexibility.

On the import front, prognostications for an import boom similarly seen during COVID remain cloudy, due in part to American consumers having less cash than during the stimulus-fueled buying binge. The report adds that it was demand-driven, while the current surge in imports during Q1 was more supply-driven, as shippers tried to pull goods forward to avoid higher costs.

“Even though costs were high, there was a sense that they could grow higher in the future. Today, after several rounds of start-and-stop tariffs, shippers may doubt that the highest levels of threatened tariffs will ever come to pass. At the same time, costs are higher on imports from essentially every country than they were a year ago,” added the report.

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