An owner-operator running two trucks struggled to keep a driver on their payroll. The truck was parked two hours from where he lived. For the driver he hired, it turned into a multi-hour trip to and from the truck. The solution was deceptively simple: a $150-a-month reserved parking spot near the driver’s home.
Truck Parking Club sells that solution as Fleet Parking, targeting 5 or more spaces for trucks, trailers or combinations depending on fleet needs.
“Hey, instead of having to drive two hours to the truck whenever you go home, I’ll just book a spot five minutes from your house and your commute’s five minutes,” said Reed Loustalot, CMO of Truck Parking Club, in an interview with FreightWaves, recounting what the operator told a new hire. “So it’s a modest investment for a huge headache gone.”
To help fuel that fleet expansion, the company announced Aug. 13 that Chief Relationship Officer Brent Hutto was selected for the Board of Directors of the Texas Trucking Association, where he already chairs its Truck Parking Committee. Texas is Truck Parking Club’s largest market, with more than 700 Property Member locations and nearly 14,000 truck and trailer parking spaces.
Nationally the network lists more than 6,400 locations across 50 states. That’s up from the 5,000 it passed in April, and it is targeting 10,000 by the end of 2026. Drivers from 93 of the top 100 fleets have already parked at its locations. One fleet that plugs into the platform gains yard capacity it never has to sign a lease for.
The retention math fleets never ran
Large fleets know they have a turnover problem. Until recently, almost none of them treated parking as a lever. Loustalot said the gap surfaces the moment he asks a direct question on a trade show floor.
“Oftentimes if I’m at a conference and I’m talking to somebody who’s a fleet manager or something like that or just in ops, I’ll ask them, ‘Do you do anything to provide parking for your drivers?’ And for a lot of them they’re kind of just like, ‘Well, I don’t really know what I could do, right?’”
They had a point, he said, because the alternative involves time and a lot of guesswork.
“They could essentially just fire up Google Maps and say, ‘Hey driver, you can go check this rest area out. I have no clue if there’s any space but there you go.’”
The benefits run downstream from there. A driver who knows where to park in advance does not burn an hour from the clock looking for it. For high-value freight, it can now sit behind a secured fence overnight.
“Your drivers aren’t stopping an hour short of their drive time every day to park,” Loustalot said. “If they’re transporting sensitive freight, you can book them higher security locations.”
When surveyed, drivers consistently rank the parking problem nearly at the top of their list. Truck parking placed second among commercial drivers in the American Transportation Research Institute’s 2025 survey of more than 4,200 industry stakeholders, behind only compensation, and fourth among all respondents.
Fleet truck parking accounts built like a toll pass
Truck Parking Club has spent three and a half years building the account structure that lets a fleet decide who does the booking. Drivers can hold company accounts funded by a shared payment method or a deposit, and dispatchers, safety staff or fleet managers can book on their behalf instead.
“In the same way that you would like a toll pass. Fleets just fill up the toll pass and drivers go use it and that’s that. It’s the same sort of idea. We can do that,” Loustalot said.
The reporting layer is the key part of what turns it into a viable fleet product.
“All the while the fleet has all the visibility of where the bookings are, what locations they’re parking at, who’s doing it, how much are they spending,” Loustalot said.
Volume data suggests the plumbing holds. More than 500,000 units have parked through the network, Loustalot said, spanning solo drivers booking a night to fleets dropping 500 trailers across 50 locations.
What fleets are really renting is real estate they cannot otherwise touch.
“They can’t go out and sign a bunch of long-term leases on property all over the country. … They just don’t want to deal with it. And why would they? But we just give you essentially access to yards anywhere,” Loustalot said.
Why every parking conversation ends up in Texas
Hutto joined Truck Parking Club in 2025 after more than two decades in freight technology and media, including a run as chief relationship officer at Truckstop and leadership roles at Randall Reilly. TXTA was founded in 1932 and represents hundreds of member companies, from small family fleets to Fortune 500 carriers.
“Every parking conversation in this industry eventually becomes a conversation about Texas,” Hutto said. “The freight is here, the drivers are here, and the shortage is here. Serving on the board widens that work to the full set of issues facing trucking in Texas.”
The state’s public rest areas hold 1,409 truck parking spaces, or 7.6 spaces for every 100 miles of National Highway System roadway, according to state-level data ATRI released in April 2025. Texas spends $17,033 a year maintaining each of those public spaces. Two parking supplies exist in the state, and the gap between them is whether a driver can reserve the space before arriving.
The board seat puts a parking vendor in the room where Texas carriers set their policy agenda.
“Brent’s expertise in addressing one of our industry’s most pressing challenges, safe and accessible truck parking, will be a tremendous asset as we continue advancing the interests of Texas trucking,” said TXTA President and CEO John Esparza.
Association work runs parallel to the company’s sales push into large fleets, and Loustalot said the two feed each other because the education has to happen before a fleet manager knows the category exists.
“A big part of our job is education. And when I say education, I don’t mean we have all the answers,” Loustalot said. “Everything that we’ve learned about how to use us, we’ve actually really just learned from our customers.”
State associations are where that transfer scales. The company has a representative working with the Kentucky Trucking Association, Loustalot said, and Hutto’s board role reaches past anything it books out of it.
“He’s been tapped on the shoulder to help steer,” Loustalot said. “He’s going to bring a lot of value to them and so that goes above and beyond his mission with us.”
The truck parking shortage as a routing input
Large fleets automated two decisions on every long haul years ago: where to buy diesel and which tolls to skip. The third one, where the truck sleeps, still runs on guesswork and phone calls. Extending the same optimization logic to the overnight spot is not the hard part, Loustalot said, and he puts the difficulty squarely on the supply side.
“The routing and the decision-making logic and the technology around that, it’s not obviously simple, but that’s the easy part. The hard part is the network that you plug into to facilitate it,” he said. “Just think about how much more optimized you are when you have access to hundreds of thousands of additional spaces that you can operate with a certainty that they’re going to exist.”
Loustalot used an example of electric car charger routing logic to describe the destination.
“If you’ve ever driven a Tesla and you’ve plugged in a route, say from Chattanooga to Chicago, the battery is not going to take you the whole way. So what Tesla does is they say, ‘Hey, here’s your route. It’s 650 miles or whatever. You need to charge here,’” he said. “That’s probably a close analogy to what we’re doing and where we’re going, which is a world where you as a driver can have that same sort of experience, but instead of charging your Tesla, it’s where you park in your truck.”
None of it gets marketed on the machine learning underneath.
“Nobody cares about how the sausage is made,” Loustalot said. “They care that it works and that it provides serious value.”
Interfaces are the next build. A voice booking flow keeps a driver’s hands on the wheel, and third-party portals put the network in front of fleets already running someone else’s software.
Truck Parking Club announced an integration with fleet platform provider Platform Science in July 2025.
“If a driver could make a phone call on a headset and find a spot and basically have like a travel agent, but like a parking agent essentially, that’s a realistic kind of user interface we could bolt on to our network,” Loustalot said. “The more ways we can do it, the more kind of interfaces we can plug into, whether it’s ours or some of our third party partners like Platform Science.”
The in-cab version is the one that would put parking in the same tier as fuel routing.
“We’re having serious conversations with some of the companies who are in a position to put us in the cabs to provide that sort of experience at a very large scale,” Loustalot said. “And so that’s where we’re going.”
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Amazon’s use this year of the famed Shinkansen bullet trains for line-haul transportation of packages has made same-day delivery possible from Tokyo to parts of central and northern Japan.
Incorporating the train’s speed and reliability into the middle-mile network has reduced transit time and carbon emissions. Management is pleased with the results so far, spokesman Steve Kelly said.
Meanwhile, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is deploying e-cargo bikes — a decidedly slower, but tactically efficient mode for dense, urban environments — in the U.S. West Coast for the first time.
The e-commerce platform this year contracted with three Japan Railway companies to haul parcels on three high-speed routes connecting Amazon fulfillment centers in the Greater Tokyo area with the Hakodate, Aomori and Kanazawa areas. Packages are stored in non-passenger compartments.
Traveling at speeds of up to 200 mph, the Sinkansen network is recognized for its high level of punctuality, enabling Amazon to provide faster and more secure deliveries, according to the company.
Using the trains helps reduce emissions and road congestion compared to long-distance truck transport between cities.
The new package delivery system began in March on the Tohoku Shinkansen and Tohoku-Hokkaido Shinkansen lines, and in May on the Hokuriku line.
Bullet trains are not the only creative method Amazon uses to get packages to customers faster and more sustainably.
In more than 50 cities across Europe, compact e-cargo bikes are a convenient way for associates to make deliveries in crowded neighborhoods, reduce noise and zero tailpipe emissions, and take vehicles off the road.
Amazon is also testing e-cargo bikes, which resemble golf carts with a rear compartment, in Washington, D.C.. Last week it launched e-cargo bike operations in Culver City, California., outside of Los Angeles. The service, which will be operated by two independent delivery partners, began with 25 bikes and will ramp up to full capability over the next four to six weeks, spokeswoman Leigh Anne Gullett said.
Amazon also plans to roll out e-cargo bikes in the Los Angeles County city of Burbank in the next few weeks.
Both Culver City and Burbank e-cargo bike operations are permanent. Full implementation takes several weeks because couriers need to be trained and delivery service providers want to deploy in small batches on shorter routes to ensure deliveries run smoothly while operators learn on the job. The gentle onramp gives them room to work through any hiccups that pop up during a launch. Eventually, Amazon will operate dozens of routes out of the Culver City and Burbank delivery stations, said Gullett.
Amazon’s e-bike training covers safety, local road regulations, onsite procedures, on-road delivery methods, and daily vehicle safety inspections, followed by a practical assessment and a road course test. The e-bikes also include multiple safety features, such as rear cameras, regenerative braking to help control speed downhill, automatic parking brakes, and electronic locks. Drivers wear helmets and reflective safety vests.
Each pedal-assist e-bike, which can reach a top speed of 12 mph, can carry around 240 packages per shift, using one refill stop. The vehicles open a wider pool of hiring candidates because a drivers’ license is required to operate them.
The retailer’s logistics arm this year is also scaling up drone delivery across the United States and has launched operations in England.
On Michigan’s Mackinac Island, where motor vehicles have been banned since the end of the nineteenth century, the resort’s 500 or so residents rely on horse-drawn carriages to receive their deliveries. And in Venice, last-mile deliveries are often made by boat on the city’s famous waterways.
To reach the small island of Monhegan, 10 miles off the central coast of Maine, Amazon partners with the operator of a 65-foot wooden boat to transport packages. The Laura B. was built in 1943 and sailed in the South Pacific during World War II as a patrol boat carrying troops, supplies and two 50-caliber machine guns on deck. When the boat arrives at the dock in Monhegan, the local mail carrier loads the packages into her pickup truck for delivery.
Why It Matters: Amazon’s focus on pleasing the customer means it will try any mode that increases speed, efficiency or access to remote areas, which few companies are able to do.
Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper articles by Eric Kulisch.
Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.
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The benchmark diesel price used for most fuel surcharges hit an important milestone this week: it is at its highest level since military action commenced against Iran in early March.
The weekly Department of Energy/Energy Information Administration average weekly retail diesel price rose 19.8 cents/gallon to $5.652/g, effective Monday but published Tuesday. The previous high price was $5.643/g set April 6.
That price is now up 39.5 cts/g in the last two weeks.
But after increasing for 12 out of 13 trading days through Friday, which translated into the higher retail price published by DOE/EIA, ultra low sulfur diesel (ULSD) on the CMD commodity exchange declined Monday by 22.72 cts/g, falling to $4.2677/g. At approximately 10 a.m. Monday, it was up slightly though had been down about 6 cts/g earlier.
The high settlement during that runup was Friday, when it settled just under $4.50/g, starting to push closer to the March 20 settlement of $4.6084/g that marked the highest settle since military action against Iran began.
The sudden downward turn in prices that began as soon as trading on the CME commenced for the week Sunday evening U.S. time has been attributed to the U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent saying the Trump administration will focus more on economic pressure on Iran rather than renewed military action.
The diesel market has been marked in recent weeks by its strengthening on the retail level, even as retail gasoline has not moved anywhere near as much.
For example, the AAA average daily gasoline price Tuesday was $4.0969/g. A month ago, it was $4.1109/g.
Retail diesel was $5.2778/g a month ago, according to AAA. On Tuesday, it was $5.6199/g.
Diesel markets have their own set of bullish factors that gasoline avoids: Ukrainian strikes on diesel-oriented Russian refineries; the physical qualities of Middle East crudes that aren’t getting to market, which tend to produce high quantities of diesel; and as has been the case for several years, reduced demand for the marginal barrel of gasoline because of steady adoption of electric vehicles around the world (though less so in the U.S.)
One debate that is ongoing in oil markets in the last several days has been wide swings in estimates of the amount of oil getting through the Strait of Hormuz.
Much of the debate was spurred by reporting from Axios, which quoted unidentified U.S. officials as saying a “stealth” transit led by the U.S. through the southern portion of the Gulf, to avoid Iranian attacks, has helped the supply of oil out of the Gulf get up to 10 million b/d, which is still only about half of the pre-war level.
But given that the source of that information were Trump administration officials, the number received significant pushback in social media.
David Wech, the chief economist at tanker-tracking firm Vortexa, told CNBC Friday that the number it sees fluctuates. While he did not refer to the Axios report directly, he indirectly said it could be accurate on some days.
“Currently, where we are seeing it depends a lot on which time period you look at,” Wech said. “On the average of the last month, we see six to seven million barrels per day of crude oil going through. There are peaks in our data on the seven-day moving average of up to close to 10 million barrels per day, and the best day we saw was 40 million barrels per day. So it depends really a lot what time period you’re looking at.”
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Shippers should consider U.S. West Coast import gateways for significant cost savings, even with added inland logistics.
“If a shipper has the flexibility of importing goods into U.S. West Coast instead of East Coast, then they must seriously consider it because there is dramatic savings potential, even if it means a heavier reliance on truck and rail to reach the final destination,” said Xeneta Chief Analyst Peter Sand. “This underlines the dynamic approach supply chain professionals must take in managing resilience and freight spend during major market shocks.”
While spot rates on the trans-Pacific continue to tick up, the spread between these two U.S. fronthaul trades is also growing.
“Importing into the U.S. East Coast is currently $3,334 per forty foot equivalent unit (FEU) more expensive than the U.S. West Coast,” Sand said. “Incredibly, this current spread between the trades is greater than the total cost of shipping one container into either coast before the start of the Middle East crisis on February 28 when spot rates stood at $1,879 per FEU into U.S. West Coast and $2,651 into U.S. East Coast.”
Xeneta’s market average spot rates from Asia for the week of August 21 were up 2.7% to $7,193 per FEU to the West Coast, and 2.8% to $10,527 to the East Coast.
Carriers are flexing their negotiating strength amid unexpectedly strong demand and increased blank sailings, sending spot rates to the East Coast up almost 300% compared to pre-Middle East crisis. Severe congestion from typhoons and growing demand among key Asia ports is also causing havoc in rotations.
“But the European trades show there is a ceiling, with spot rates into North Europe and Mediterranean softening for over a month,” said Sand. “Uncertainty is toxic for supply chains and the uncertainty feels more severe in the U.S., which could explain why rates are still heading upwards. But U.S. shippers should certainly look towards Europe when negotiating because it shows carriers are not invincible and it is possible to negotiate lower rates.”
Since the end of February, Asia-West Coast prices are up 39%, or $2,812 per FEU. Asia-East Coast rates have surged 42%, or $4,399 per FEU.
Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.
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Descartes Systems Group announced Monday that it has acquired Tai, a TMS provider for freight brokers, for $100 million. The deal was funded with cash on hand.
California-based Tai’s AI-powered platform oversees the entire shipment lifecycle, including quoting, sourcing, execution and invoicing. The TMS primarily executes truckload, less-than-truckload, drayage and cross-border shipments.
“The acquisition expands our transportation management capabilities for freight brokers and adds valuable transaction, carrier and shipment execution data to the Descartes Global Logistics NetworkTM,” said Andrew Wimer, associate general manager of transportation management at Descartes.
The Canadian company continues to expand its offering through acquisitions. It has executed 34 deals since 2017.
Descartes (NASDAQ: DSGX) acquired Latin American last-mile logistics tech provider Drivin for $30 million last month. It acquired Pittsburgh-based fleet safety solutions provider Idelic for $28 million in April.
“Tai complements our strengths in carrier onboarding, compliance, fraud prevention, and real-time visibility,” said Descartes CEO Ed Ryan. “By combining our solutions, we see a significant opportunity to help freight brokers navigate change, streamline freight execution, improve operating margins, strengthen customer and carrier relationships, and support digital transformation.”
Descartes reports 2027 fiscal second quarter results on Sept. 10 after the market closes.
Why it matters? The deal signals a strategic move toward deeper digital integration and automation in broker-focused technology.
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