Assessing truck parking facility impacts on fatigue-related crashes: A Florida Corridor Study

Truck driver fatigue remains a critical safety concern on U.S. highways and is exacerbated by constraints in accessing appropriate rest opportunities. Prior studies largely emphasize public rest areas, while private truck stops, despite providing substantial parking supply, are less often examined at a corridor scale. This study uses corridor-based descriptive mapping and negative binomial regression to assess associations between truck parking characteristics and fatigue-consistent CMV crash counts along Florida freight corridors (2019–2023). Segment-level crashes were linked with parking inventory and Truck AADT, with exposure and segment length included in log form. Results indicate that Truck AADT is strongly associated with higher expected crash counts (elasticity = 0.30, p < 0.001), and segment length is also positively associated (elasticity = 0.50, p < 0.001). After controlling these factors, public parking spaces and a facility preference index (overnight availability/fuel/24-h operation) were not statistically significant, while private parking capacity was positively associated with fatigue-consistent crashes (p = 0.005). Findings highlight that exposure dominates corridor-level fatigue-consistent crash occurrence and that parking-supply measures, especially private capacity, should be interpreted in terms of corridor demand and effective accessibility, not nominal capacity alone.