Service area, rest area, turnout, rest area with warning,
rest area with DOT station, turnout with DOT station
Service area, rest area, turnout, rest area with warning,
rest area with DOT station, turnout with DOT station
Rest areas are places setup along the right of way of a highway, designed to give the traveller a place to legally and safely stop, park and get out of the car or truck and stretch the legs. Commonly, rest areas contain local information postings, bathroom facilities, picnic areas, areas for exercising pets, grass and shade, but they may also contain vending areas, tourist electronic information kiosks, and other amenities. Akin to rest areas are service areas, which boast fueling vendors and restaurants, and turnouts, which have no amenities except for parking and, perhaps, information postings. The icons for these three types of rest areas are displayed here. The same icons, with red borders, indicate rest stops that are flagged for some kind of problem; such a rest stop cannot be found to verify its exact location, or has been closed, usually. Explanation can be found in the area's icon information bubble.
The screen shot to the left illustrates rest stops in TruckTrek. The area is around Harrisburg, PA; it shows a service area on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a rest area in I-81 and a pair of turnouts on I-83. The rest area's Info display is shown, telling the user the name and highway location of the rest area, and the fact that it serves both directions on the interstate. It could also show a telephone number and general remarks, if they are known. In the bottom of the info there are two URLs for displaying overhead images of the rest stop.
States commonly place rest areas about every 35-40 miles along interstate highways, and also along other roads. A rest area usually allows for direct access from the highway through deceleration/acceleration ramps, and these are dedicated to one side or the other of a split lane highway. In general, if the highway has an even number, it is considered to flow, at least approximately, in a east-west direction, and therefore the direct access rest area will be either on the east-bound (EB) or the west-bound lanes. If the number is odd, it will be on the north-bound or south-bound. When the lanes are not split, then a rest area on one side or the other is usually considered to serve both directions, unless the signage indicates differently. Other configurations for rest areas are in the middle between the lanes, and usually serves both directions, rest areas located off of entrance/exit ramps, and finally rest areas that are labelled off road, which are accessed by local roads at a highway interchange. When a direct access rest stop occurs on one side of a split lane highway, it may be all by itself or it may be paired with one on the other side. If they are directly adjacent or separated by no more than approximately two miles, TruckTrek will display only a single rest stop icon marked for both directions, and if they are split farther apart than 100 yards or so, they are remarked as "Split sites", and the icon is placed between them. If the spacing exceeds roughly a couple of miles, there will be separate one-side icons displayed.
Parking spaces at rest areas are usually provided for cars and for semi rigs; in some cases, there is a set of separate spaces for RVs, which are bigger than a car but shorter than an 80' tractor-trailer. Semi parking may be heel-and-toe on one or both sides of a widened lane, or, more lately, it may be side-by-side parking in one or more parallel rows (as shown in the image above). Truckers can often be very inventive in adding parking spaces where none are marked; the picture to the left shows a morning shot of a rest area, including several late arrivals parked around the edges of the official parking.
Turnouts (rest areas without bathroom facilities) may be anything from a wide place in the roadway to lit parking areas specifically designed for parking trucks. They may be older rest stops that have been obsoleted by newer ones, or they may have been simply construction areas. Some turnouts are deliberately designed to provide scenic viewing areas. In order to handle trucks they normally have to be paved, as a muddy parking area for an 80,000 pound truck is not a thought to be contemplated. Many new turnouts for trucks exclusively have been constructed to handle a nightly overflow crowd which can gather on exit and entrance ramps, and even along interstate shoulders when spaces are hard to find.
Truck parking has also been augmented at many state inspection stations to handle overflow, making the inspections stations partially rest areas. In some cases full rest areas are actually combined with a weigh station. Truckers tend to feel uneasy using them as some inspectors have been known to awaken drivers or greet them when they awaken themselves with an inspection. The federal DOT has been trying to end that practice, but many truckers are still leery of using a closed weigh station for a night's stop.
Most rest areas are identified by the route number and mile marker they are closest to. Some states, such as Illinois and California, name some of their rest stops. Some occur in state parks, Indian reservations and other special-use land, and these are noted in TruckTrek.
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