Indian River

I’ve been to more customers than I can remember, and I can honestly say that 95% of them allow us to park on their property for our breaks or to hang out if we happen to show up early. The 5% who don’t allow that usually have locked gates and are only open during the day. If it’s not a locked gate issue, it’s a limited real estate issue where there just isn’t room to park, or if we did, we would be blocking the area that other trucks need to access in order to load/unload. It’s not a common problem, though.

Over the years, I’ve tried to post information on here about which ones do and don’t, because it helps a person plan their trips. Personally, I find it annoying when I drive all the way into a large metro area at night, only to discover a locked gate at the customer I intended to sleep at. When that happens, sometimes it’s a 30+ mile drive back out of the city, and if it’s late in the evening, the truck stops are already filled up. In that situation, by the time a person does find a place to do their break, it can cause the delivery to be late the following morning. Example: You finally manage to park somewhere at 11pm, which means your 10 hour break isn’t over until 9am, but the customer wants it at 8am. Had there not been a locked gate the night before, or had the driver known ahead of time and found a place to park earlier in the afternoon, they would have been able to deliver on time. For that reason, I welcome anyone on here to post on this thread when they encounter that somewhere. It sure helps the next driver out, myself included. I wish “overnight parking allowed” or “overnight parking not allowed” was in the comment section on every single load assignment.

 

The number is listed on some of our load assignments, but the company has expressed to us through fleet messages in the past that they don’t want us to call them direct. They prefer dispatch to be the go between. I assume the customers requested that be the case to eliminate phone line congestion at their facilities and to prevent their office staff from taking awkward calls from truck drivers. If I were to guess, someone, somewhere in the past got irritated or moody on the phone with a customer and caused that policy to be enacted.