You can’t overlook the presence of large trucks along the bustling stretch of Interstate 94 in southeastern Michigan.
This highway serves as a crucial artery for freight, connecting Detroit to the U.S.-Canada border at Windsor, and facilitating the flow of goods between the two nations.
For Scott Grenerth, who is the director of engagement at Truck Specialized Parking Services, this constant traffic highlights just how vital trucks are to our everyday lives.
Grenerth emphasizes, “The saying ‘if you bought it, a truck brought it’ is remarkably close to the truth.”
However, the moment drivers exit the highway, they encounter an all-too-common and persistent issue.
At rest areas and truck stops, parking can fill quickly, especially later in the day.
Arkevian Lenoir is a Memphis, Tennessee-based driver who takes his 18-wheeler across the country.
At a rest stop in Belleville, outside Detroit, he says the search for parking often becomes part of the route itself.
Lenoir says: “After around, maybe, 5 o’clock, you might as well consider every parking spot gone. So, the plan is, honestly, to drive until you find one. That’s the only option you’ve got, really.”
Detroit-based tech company Birdstop says drones could help make that search less uncertain.
During a demonstration, one of its drones flies above a parking deck, showing the kind of aerial view the company wants to bring to truck parking sites.
It’s not just taking pictures of the lot.
It flies over the site to capture aerial imagery and telemetry data, then Birdstop’s AI and computer vision software analyses that view to detect trucks and identify which parking spaces are still open.
That information is then fed into Truck Specialized Parking Services’ platform, so drivers and parking operators can see availability in real time.
The company is testing the system in Detroit, close to the Canadian border and the freight traffic moving across the water to and from Windsor.
Keith Miao, Birdstop founder and CEO, says: “This is a great place to do it, being at the busiest trucking corridor in the whole nation, across the water from Windsor, facilitating the trade between U.S. and Canada through trucking.”
Some highway signs already tell drivers how many spaces are available at upcoming rest areas.
But they don’t solve the wider shortage.
If a driver has already tried several truck stops and the next sign shows little or no space ahead, the information is useful but still leaves them with few options.
Lenoir says: “If you had a bad day and you think, ‘Man, I’ve been to five truck stops already, and I haven’t found one parking spot, so I’m going to go to this rest area.’ It’s kind of disheartening, honestly. It’s like, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do now.’”
Birdstop has deployed drone systems at two truck stops in Detroit monitored by Truck Specialized Parking Services.
The aim is to connect that drone-based monitoring with TSPS’s real time parking platform, so drivers can see more accurate information before they arrive.
Grenerth, a former driver, says the drones can also show what happens after marked spaces are full, when truckers start using the rest of a lot in unofficial ways.
Grenerth says: “The key thing for the trucker is it’s letting you know in real time: This many spaces are available. It can go up and fly as many times as is needed throughout the day, throughout the night. And part of the extra information is about the utilization of the facility, because truckers, when all the marked parking spaces are taken up, no matter whether it’s a rest area or a private truck stop, they will get creative immediately and start creating other spaces.”
Birdstop says the Detroit deployment is an early phase in a wider effort to test and scale drone-based infrastructure monitoring across the U.S.
The company and TSPS say better parking data could reduce the time drivers spend searching and give truck stops a clearer picture of how their lots are being used.
For Lenoir, the need is more immediate, however.
Driving hours are limited, routes are tight and a driver can’t always keep moving from one lot to another hoping space opens up.
Lenoir says: “You don’t have much time to go anywhere most of the time. And if you can go somewhere, you hope that a parking spot’s there. It’s kind of aggravating.”
While it makes it easier for truckers to navigate busy parking lots, the system doesn’t fix the crucial problem that is limited spaces. That will require more lots, spaces and solutions.
Grenerth says: “We have three states in a row. Indiana, Ohio and Pensyllvania, all between them adding 4,000 truck spaces being added by the end of next year (2027) going into the following year. Indiana’s a little slower with their deployment but Ohio and Pensyllvania are already on it. My home state of Ohio is already adding a total of 1,400 spaces. You need to have the number of spaces and capacity, and you need to have truckers have a way to find that capacity.”
Birdstop’s drone system is being tested at a small number of sites and if it’s successful could be rolled out more widely.