By Scott Ramser, Ramser Development Company
In June 2026, the Florida Department of Transportation broke ground on new truck parking along Interstate 4 in Central Florida. A $180 million federal grant pays for 917 spaces at five sites. The first three, in Seminole and Volusia counties, are due to open in mid-2027. The Orange and Osceola sites start construction in 2027.
That's good news for every driver who has circled an exit at midnight looking for a legal place to stop. It also shows the pace. Public truck parking gets built a hundred or two spaces at a time, years after everyone agrees it's needed.
The American Transportation Research Institute published its annual survey of trucking's top concerns on October 18, 2026. Nearly 3,100 people across the industry took part. Fuel prices went to the top of the list, and truck parking fell out of the overall top ten. Drivers still ranked it second, behind fuel. For the people who need a space at night, the problem hasn't gone anywhere.
My argument is narrower. The shortage is really two shortages. Public money is aimed mostly at one of them, and the other is turning into an investable category inside industrial outdoor storage (IOS). We operate in it, so I'll also say what we've seen.
Two parking problems
The first is the one the I-4 project addresses. A long-haul driver runs out of legal hours a long way from home and needs somewhere safe to rest. Federal hours-of-service rules limit how long a driver can drive before resting. ATRI estimates the average driver gives up 56 minutes of drive time a day looking for parking. Rest areas, truck stops and the new I-4 sites all serve that driver.
The second problem gets less attention. It belongs to the trucks that are home. A regional carrier, a last-mile delivery company or a driving school has tractors and trailers based in a metro area. Those trucks need somewhere to sit every night and every weekend, close to the customers and highways they work. That isn't a rest stop. It's a fenced, paved yard, leased by the month, with a gate the tenant's drivers can get through at 4 a.m.
The Truck Parking Safety Improvement Act, a bill still pending in the House, would fund public truck parking with competitive grants. As written, it bars grant recipients from charging drivers a fee to use the lots it pays for. That makes sense for rest parking. A home-base yard is a different product, rented to a business by the month, and I expect private owners will be the ones to build it.
Why it belongs inside IOS
Write down what a managed truck parking yard needs and you get an IOS acquisition checklist. Low-coverage land with industrial zoning that permits the use. A paved surface, fencing and lighting. A location close to population and the interstates. Our own acquisition criteria describe the same land.
Capital has noticed. In February 2026, Alterra IOS bought a ten-property portfolio of truck terminals, about 45 usable acres across ten markets, one of them in Orlando. Nine of the ten came fully leased to multinational freight carriers. In September 2025, Outpost, a truck parking and fleet terminal operator that manages a truck and trailer storage portfolio GreenPoint Partners launched in 2023, said the capital available to it had doubled to $1 billion. And on October 20, 2026, Truck Parking Club, a marketplace for reservable truck and trailer parking, took a growth investment from Argentum Capital Partners.
So why call it the next sub-sector and not the current one? Because the money is small next to the need, and the sites are scattered. Outpost, a well-funded platform, had more than 30 facilities nationwide as of March 2026. That's for the whole country. IOS looked like this before the large aggregators arrived. The demand was real, and independent owners were working it one parcel at a time.
Supply won't loosen quickly. When ATRI surveyed state transportation departments in 2025, the barriers they cited most often for adding truck parking were lack of funding (36%), community pushback (27%) and finding suitable land (25%). A private owner faces the same neighbors and the same zoning map. Whoever already holds paved, industrially zoned land near a city has something the next entrant will struggle to replicate.
It's a different operating job
People assume truck parking is RV storage with bigger vehicles. In some ways it is. You still run a gate, a fence, lighting and a base of monthly tenants. But the site is built differently. The spaces are bigger, the trucks need wider turning room, and the surface has to be tougher.
The tenant is different too. Truck parking works better leased to companies than rented space by space to individual drivers. A fleet takes a block of spaces under one agreement. That gives you one relationship to manage and a rent roll a buyer can underwrite, which is the point I made about IOS more generally.
This is the part capital can't simply buy. An aggregator can buy acres. Keeping a yard full of fleet tenants, and keeping it usable at 4 a.m., takes an operator.
What we've seen in Orlando
We bought Truck Storage Depot in Orlando in August 2023. It's about 14 acres in three parts: a 10-acre managed truck parking facility with 250 spaces on Seminole Avenue, and two industrial outdoor storage parcels of about two acres each on Patch Road. The truck parking had opened that January and was about half full when we closed.
A trucking company leased the first IOS parcel within weeks of our purchase and uses it as its Orlando base. Another trucking company took the second parcel in May 2026. As of October 2026, the truck parking facility is full. Its tenants include a commercial driver training school, a freight logistics carrier and a last-mile delivery company.
That tenant list is the argument in small. None of those businesses is a driver looking for a place to sleep on the way through. Each one keeps trucks in Orlando and needs a yard near the city to keep them in. When the I-4 project broke ground, the head of the Federal Highway Administration said truckers deserve a safe place to rest. The new sites will give that to drivers passing through Central Florida. It's a different job from a home-base yard.
Where this goes
The rest-parking shortage is well documented. The case for the home-base yard rests on different evidence: leases. Businesses that keep trucks in Orlando filled our yard there, and Alterra bought terminals that were nearly all leased to freight carriers. Managed truck parking sits on the land IOS buyers already want. Public money is building rest parking slowly, and rest parking isn't the home-base yard. The platforms forming now are well funded but still small.
In IOS, capital arrived and started assembling portfolios, and the operators who had done the work early held the sites it wanted. I expect truck parking to follow the same path. I can't tell you when. When it does, the owners already running yards that fleets depend on will be where the early IOS operators were.
Scott Ramser founded Ramser Development Company in 1986 with his grandfather, Harold Ramser, and is its Chief Executive Officer. The firm is a family-owned developer and operator of RV and boat storage, truck parking and industrial outdoor storage.