Free vs paid truck parking
“Free” on a sign and “free” in a database are different things. This page explains the four labels used on every listing. Adding your lot to the directory is free either way. The site does not take payment for a listing, a claim, or a correction.
The four labels
- Free. OpenStreetMap says
fee=no, or the place is a public rest area or welcome center and no source says otherwise. Public parking can still have a time limit. Confirm the sign. - Paid. A source says a fee is charged (
fee=yesor a price). It does not say how much, and the price on the tag may be stale. - Free and paid. The usual truck-stop case. The brand or the “truck stop” type is known, and no source settled the fee. Many of these lots let you park without a separate charge and also sell reserved spaces. We do not know the split at that address.
- Fee unknown. A truck parking lot or diesel stop with no fee tag and no reason to assume it is a public rest area.
What people mean by free
A public rest area is generally a no-fee stop. A truck stop is private: the parking may be free to use, free with a purchase, or partly reserved through a paid network. Those policies differ by chain and by store, and they change. This directory does not publish a chain-wide policy, because that would go stale and it is not in the federal survey.
Paid reservation services exist. They are not required to use the unpaid spaces at a truck stop, and this site does not sell them or rank lots by who partners with them.
What the space count is
A number of truck spaces comes from the FHWA Jason’s Law field number_of_spots when the federal row survived the merge, or from OpenStreetMap capacity:hgv (or total capacity on a lot that is designated for trucks).
The federal compilation date is April 9, 2019. If both sources had a number, the federal count is the one kept.
No number means nobody reported one. It does not mean the lot has zero spaces.