There’s a lot of space for trucks to park that isn’t traditional. Trucker Tools is teaming up with SecurSpace this month to create an “Airbnb for truckers” looking for a safe space to rest at the end of their shift.
Drivers and fleets using Trucker Tools will soon have access to nearly 1,000 locations offering space for truck parking and other asset storage through SecurSpace, which runs an online marketplace that connects businesses looking for parking and storage options to property owners with dedicated or excess capacity.
The lack of available truck parking was the No. 3 concern for commercial drivers, according to the American Transportation Research Institute’s 2019 “Critical Issues in the Trucking Industry” survey and report released last fall. As the report noted, truck parking shortages create “a dangerous and costly dilemma for truck drivers who are often forced to drive beyond allowable HOS (hours of service) rules or park in undesignated and, in many cases, unsafe locations.
Photo: SecurSpace
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is currently updating the 2015 Jason’s Law Truck Parking Survey Results and Comparative Analysis while more than half of all states have completed or are in the process of truck parking studies.
What Trucker Tools and SecurSpace are calling a “strategic engagement” will provide the driver community on the Trucker Tools mobile app with access to both overnight and longer-term truck parking. The app, which has nearly 900,000 independent drivers and 140,000 small fleet operators using the service, provides real-time shipment visibility, trip planning, freight-matching and automated booking tools for freight brokers and small-fleet truckload carriers. And now it will provide them with more parking options.
“With SecurSpace, it’s a huge amount of locations that we’re adding to the app, but that’s also just the beginning in many ways,” Prasad Gollapalli, Trucker Tools founder and CEO, told American Trucker. “Our partnership gives SecurSpace leverage to go to these private parking locations and be able to quickly onboard them.”
The “supply and demand,” Gollapalli said, will give SecurSpace more leverage to create on-demand access to industrial real estate properties with available parking, which previously was not accessible, in cities across the country.
For commercial real estate owners, SecurSpace provides an opportunity to produce new revenue from previously unused or underutilized properties, which, in turn, helps drivers find peace of mind and place in knowing where they’ll be able to safely rest when their hours are up.
“What we do is we find and aggregate private businesses that have excess parking or storage capacity — all outdoors — into a marketplace and then make that available to the supply chain and logistics industry,” Lance Theobald, co-founder and CEO of SecurSpace, told American Trucker. “So what does that mean? Truck drivers looking for a place to park overnight, all the way up to fleets looking for a place to stage hundreds if not more containers next to the Port of Los Angeles or the Port of Long Beach, for example, can use our service to find temporary storage and parking spaces. Think Airbnb for industrial facilities.”
SecurSpace, which was founded in 2017, has primarily focused on fleets and businesses seeking longer-term parking solutions for multiple trucks, trailers and intermodal containers. Theobald said the company jumped at the chance to expand its scope to smaller fleets and drivers who want safe truck parking.
He said that all the locations are vetted for safety, and listings on the Trucker Tools app will tell drivers what sort of amenities, from restrooms to food access, are offered at each location. The price to park a truck for a day or overnight will likely range from $15 to $25, Theobald said, depending on the location.
The addition of SecurSpace expands the depth and scope of app-based, GPS-enabled parking search and reservation features Trucker Tools already provides to its driver community, Gollapalli added. “Drivers tell us they want access to more resources and a less time-consuming process to find and secure reliable parking,” he said. “This is a strategic imperative and one of the top ‘asks’ we get from drivers.”
The companies expect to begin integration work in mid-May with commercial availability to follow sometime in June. The Trucker Tools’ multi-functional, multi-party mobile app is free for independent truckers and small fleets. The SecurSpace app also is free to independent truckers and small fleet operators.
SOURCE: www.trucker.com