After being closed for over two years, a rest area in Indiana has reopened with expanded capacity for truck parking.
The newly renovated truck parking facility is located off I-65 in Boone County near mile marker 148. Carrying a $37 million price tag, the rest area includes 150 truck parking spaces and restroom facilities – doubling the previous capacity.
“This is progress toward helping alleviate parking shortages faced by the freight and logistics industries across the state,” Lyndsay Quist, Indiana Department of Transportation commissioner, said in a statement.
The renovated facilities are part of a larger plan to expand truck parking across Indiana. The state’s Rest Area and Welcome Center Improvement plan is a 10-year initiative to “modernize facilities, construct new buildings, improve parking and convert some to semitrailer truck parking facilities.”
Those plans include investing over $600 million in improvements to 21 of the state’s 26 rest areas, welcome centers and truck parking facilities by the end of fiscal year 2034.
One of the first projects in the plan to be completed was the Kankakee Welcome Center. The $35 million facility officially opened in October 2023 with 113 truck parking spaces, as well as restrooms and vending buildings.
The renovations are both utilitarian and aesthetic, with plans for welcome centers designed to highlight the region where they’re located. For the Kankakee site, officials used dunes imagery and murals made from recycled wind turbines.
As for what’s next in the state’s improvement plan, three different truck parking conversion projects – at the Lizton, Taylorsville and Nancy Hanks rest areas – originally were slated to be completed in 2025.
Two of those projects, Lizton and Nancy Hanks, experienced delays and have seen construction dates put on hold. Improvements to the facilities in Taylorsville are proceeding, although behind the original schedule, with construction expected to begin in 2026.
When the improvement plan began, officials said around 1,400 parking spaces were being allocated for commercial vehicles statewide. The state DOT estimates these projects will increase that number by an additional 1,200 truck parking spaces. LL
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