Truck Parking Club has added nearly 6,000 new truck parking locations across the United States, something met with near universal praise around trucking, but drivers still have a major bone to pick with the company.
TPC locations include actual truck stops, where in many cases TPC takes payment for formerly free spots, and it doesn't accept the points drivers rack up at the fuel island as payment.
- TPC for years has said it's trying to accept truck stop points for paid parking reservations, but nothing has come of it.
- Company insiders said drivers would constantly call and complain about formerly free spots at truck stops moving to a paid model.
- TPC launched a longshot advocacy campaign to declare a National Infrastructure Emergency around truck parking, but at least one driver isn't buying it.
- TPC CEO Evan Shelley responded to company insiders' claims and drivers' skepticism in this story, one of three parts of an Overdrive series revealing how TPC has managed marketing and customer/staff relations on its way to the top of the paid-parking heap.
Truck drivers' truck-stop-points complaint kicked off a dispute between TPC CEO Evan Shelley and trucker Michelle Kitchin way back in 2024, which Overdrive reported on at the time.
[Related: Truck Parking Club turns free spaces paid: Is this the future of parking?]
At the time, Shelley committed to doing everything possible to accept points.
"We get calls into customer service with people calling asking if we can start accepting Pilot Flying J points," Shelley said in 2024. "We’re doing everything we can do to get that ability onto our app to still give the drivers the ability to use the points. I feel for them and I hear you, driver, and we are working on it."
Two years later, there’s been no progress. Meanwhile, TPC has launched an entire national advocacy push to force federal action and override land use restrictions near interstates, hoping to usher in tens of thousands of new truck parking spots.
Overdrive asked TPC back in the Spring for an update on the loyalty-points effort and didn’t get a direct answer. Half a dozen former and current staff members laid out what's happening on that front, along with TPC CEO Evan Shelley.
TPC progress toward accepting truck stop fuel points?
“They do care about saving the drivers money when they can, but like any business it’s about making money,” said an early employee of TPC.
Others reported constant upset phone calls from drivers who couldn’t spend their points on parking.
“‘I’ve been parking here X amount of years now I have to pay!’” one former customer service employee recalled truckers saying quite often. “We were listening to these drivers that were highly upset, especially when [TPC] started getting all the Pilot properties. Now all of a sudden [Pilot] wasn’t honoring [points] anymore. Now they’re having to pay $12-$15 a night. As a truck driver, you need all your money, especially when you’re an owner-operator.”
Three former employees described multiple meetings where the topic was discussed, but nothing conclusive happening.
“I’m not sure where the breakdown happened," said the early employee. "Maybe the two systems just didn’t jive.”
Ultimately, some of the Pilot locations ended up dropping TPC for its own paid parking program, and Shelley said the company’s continued to work in earnest on solving the problems, even coming up with its own solutions along the way.
“We had many meetings with [Pilot],” said Shelley. "Ultimately, they decided not to allow us to use points, and I guess good news for those drivers that had a problem with it, some of those stores converted to Prime Parking,” where the drivers now can redeem their points for paid parking reservations.
Since then, TPC has moved into providing paid parking at some Love's and TA truck stops, too. Shelley still hopes TPC will crack those points systems soon.
“With other groups, for example, Ambest, that has points, we are deep in integration talks with them,” said Shelley. “It’s on our roadmap, we just have other things, other priorities to help our members that hit before that.”
About those priorities: TPC’s own loyalty program is designed to help drivers save money by linking up their bank account or prepaying.
“We [pay] 3% if you ACH in your wallet,” said Shelley. “We essentially hand all the savings from payment processing to the driver. So if you deposit $100, you get $103. And then we also have kind of an Amazon Prime-type membership now where you get 5% bonus club cash on every booking. It is like Amazon Prime. Its monthly charge is $9.99.”
Besides, Shelley said, established truck stops with points systems make up only about 120 of TPC’s 6,000 locations.
TPC advocates for a national truck parking emergency declaration
Over the same time period TPC's tried to satisfy customer demands and accept points, it’s launched a national advocacy push to achieve something radical: A national emergency declaration and a federal mandate curtailing local zoning control around interstate corridors to roll out truck parking at scale.
[Related: Truck Parking Club's advocacy push: 'We will fight for the driver']
Full details of TPC's plan are available here. It includes having the executive branch declare a "National Infrastructure Emergency," issue effectively an executive order to end truck parking bans on suitable sites and then support legal challenges to restrictive local zoning.
“Why are we in this situation with truck parking?” Shelley asked. “Like, why isn't [truck parking] just on every corner? When you start to think from that lens, you start to realize pretty quickly overregulation by local municipalities. A lot of times the pressure is coming from NIMBY [attitudes] ... the reason that you can't get that truck stop built.”
That's a reference to “Not In My Backyard” folks, a wide group of people who typically oppose development in their towns.
Shelley described a process where towns, sometimes entire large cities, reject truck parking. Build sites get pushed further and further away from where they need to be, which gets “exacerbated across decades,” he said. “Then you magically have this shortage of hundreds of thousands of spaces because no one wants it near them.”
The answer that TPC has advocated for: a “top-down approach from the [Trump] administration is a way that can really create change quickly without having to wait for some type of bill to get through Congress,” Shelley said.
Basically TPC is after an executive order to wrest land-use control from every town on an interstate in America.
Shelley, originally a commercial real estate professional, is realistic about the potentially huge local-level backlash to such a move. He stresses he’s not advocating for truck parking in residential areas at all, adding that TPC has talked to people in the Trump administration. And ultimately, it’s their decision.
“I know if it did get done, it would be a big win for the entire industry, and I hope it gets done. But if it doesn't, that's our problem, right?” he said.
Michelle Kitchin, a company driver and a member of Real Women In Trucking, a group that has long advocated for more safe truck parking, was skeptical of Shelley's longshot advocacy push.
If there's a national infrastructure emergency around truck parking, why charge for it?
"Anytime time that you start charging for it, that’s exploiting an emergency," she said.
Kitchin supports TPC's mission to bring on more truck parking, and blamed much of the truck parking crisis on shippers and receivers. But she blamed TPC for shifting the industry toward paid parking.
"I don’t get paid to stop and fuel this truck," she said. "I waste my logbook hours, which is my pay, if I can’t drive." Truck stop points represent an illiquid part of her pay she must spend on parking or showers to not lose out.
"Those points are my pay," she said.
Kitchin was realistic about some drivers "abusing" truck stop lots, onramps, shoulders and the like, but ultimately said truck stops negotiate big contracts with fleets and providing perks like showers and parking is part of the deal, which TPC's model undermines.
"Just pay for parking? It’s not as simple as that. There’s people that can’t afford it," she said. "Getting shut down for 34 hours and having to pay for two nights, showers, food," then parking on top of it. "It’s just unaffordable and unrealistic."
Finally, she pointed to the introduction of paid parking along previously free Connecticut stops along I-95 as a result of TPC's increasingly common monetized truck parking.
"Connecticut decided to charge us for parking in the rest areas," said Kitchin. "That idea has come from a situation where they think, 'Hey, we can monetize this because the drivers can’t do anything about it.' Monkey see, monkey do."
Kitchin's skepticism mirrors what 48% of drivers told Overdrive in a 2024 survey, that paid parking options represent "Another cash grab by companies who see truckers as rolling piggy banks."
Find the other two parts of this Overdrive series via the links below:
