Where the Diesel Opportunity Sits

Cite this map: G2M Insights, "Where the Diesel Opportunity Sits," G2M Fuel & Convenience Research, edition 2026-09-13-v15, g2m.ai/research/fuel-convenience/where-diesel-demand-sits.

The corridors themselves are national. Of the 1,154 miles of road carrying more than 20,000 trucks a day, California holds 305, Florida 156, Tennessee 138 and Arkansas 131, with Illinois, Indiana and Ohio behind them. Heavy freight is not a western phenomenon.

The fuel retail on it is another matter, and that is the gap this article measures. Tennessee carries the third-largest stretch of the heaviest roads in the country, and Nashville has 8 percent of its sites on a corridor against Reno's 31. Every metro marked on this map is in the West, Texas or Florida. A corridor only reaches a fuel site if the site sits on it, and whether it does turns out to depend on how a state builds its roadsides rather than on how much freight passes.

The freight is national; the fuel retail that sits in front of it is not. A diesel plan drawn from where the trucks run will overstate the East and understate Utah, Texas and California, because the eastern fuel site is usually a block away from the road the trucks are on.

• Truck traffic on the busiest road within 650 ft:
• No road within 650 ft
• Up to 2,500 trucks a day
• 2,500 to 5,000
• 5,000 to 10,000
• More than 10,000

Cite this table: G2M Insights, "Where the Diesel Opportunity Sits," G2M Fuel & Convenience Research, edition 2026-09-13-v15, g2m.ai/research/fuel-convenience/where-diesel-demand-sits.

Three states hold eight of the ten. Utah has three, on Interstate 15: Salt Lake City, Provo-Orem and Ogden. Texas has three: Tyler, Amarillo and Dallas-Fort Worth. California has Los Angeles and Stockton. Reno sits on Interstate 80 and Ocala on Interstate 75, and both make the top five with about 200 sites each. Six of the ten have fewer than 250 sites; two have more than 2,800.

The trucks are not always on the interstate. In Salt Lake City only 10 percent of the exposed sites have an interstate as their busiest road; the rest face state routes carrying 7,000 to 12,000 trucks a day. In Amarillo 96 percent face Interstate 40 or 27. Both are exposure; only one of them is an interchange site.

14 of the 159 metros put a fifth or more of their sites on a truck corridor. The median metro is at 7 percent, and 47 are below 5 percent.

See all 159 metros ranked Searchable by metro and state, with the shares at 2,500 and 10,000 trucks a day beside the headline.

Outside a dozen metros in the West and Texas, truck exposure belongs to a few sites, not to the market. In the typical metro 7 percent of sites face the freight, so the diesel opportunity is found and priced one site at a time rather than planned for the metro.

Cite this chart: G2M Insights, "Where the Diesel Opportunity Sits," G2M Fuel & Convenience Research, edition 2026-09-13-v15, g2m.ai/research/fuel-convenience/where-diesel-demand-sits.

Utah leads at 25 percent of all its sites, with California, Texas and Arizona behind it. At the other end of the same list: Iowa 1.5, Kansas 1.7, Colorado 3.2, Wisconsin 3.6, Minnesota 3.9 percent. Among ranked metros the pattern is the same: the median California metro has 17 percent of sites on a corridor and the median Texas metro 16, against 5 to 7 percent in Florida, Ohio, New York and the Carolinas and 4 percent in Alabama and Michigan.

Cite this table: G2M Insights, "Where the Diesel Opportunity Sits," G2M Fuel & Convenience Research, edition 2026-09-13-v15, g2m.ai/research/fuel-convenience/where-diesel-demand-sits.

Size adds little. The correlation between a metro's site count and its exposure is 0.15, and the 1,000-site metros lean higher only because Los Angeles (2nd), Dallas-Fort Worth (9th), Riverside, San Antonio and Houston are in corridor states. Five of the top ten have fewer than 210 sites. This is the reverse of the competition ranking, where the largest metros were reliably the most contested.

Metro size says almost nothing about truck exposure. Reno and Ocala, with about 200 fuel sites each, put a larger share of them in front of freight than New York, Atlanta or Chicago. A diesel footprint sized by population will be in the wrong places.

Two measures that sound like truck exposure rank the metros quite differently. Ordering the 159 metros by the share of sites within 0.6 miles of an interstate agrees with this ranking at 0.29; ordering them by total traffic on the busiest adjacent road agrees at 0.26, where 1.00 would be the same list. The table shows why.

Cite this table: G2M Insights, "Where the Diesel Opportunity Sits," G2M Fuel & Convenience Research, edition 2026-09-13-v15, g2m.ai/research/fuel-convenience/where-diesel-demand-sits.

Trucks run on roads that are not interstates. Tyler has 25 percent of its sites on a corridor and 11 percent within 0.6 miles of an interstate: most of its exposed sites face Loop 323, not Interstate 20. Visalia has no interstate at all and 18 percent of its sites on a corridor, all of them on State Route 99, which carries 14,600 trucks a day through the Central Valley. College Station and Modesto are the same pattern. The reverse holds too. Urban Honolulu has 59 percent of sites within 0.6 miles of an interstate and 11 percent on a corridor, because Hawaii's interstates carry few trucks. Flint and Toledo have interstates near four sites in ten and corridors at one in twenty, because the sites sit on the arterial past the ramp rather than on the mainline. And heavy traffic is not heavy truck traffic: Miami's median site faces 41,500 vehicles a day, the highest figure in the ranking, and 12 percent of its sites are on a truck corridor.

The last point is what keeps the Interstate 95 metros low. Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington and Boston have 21 to 39 percent of their sites within 0.6 miles of an interstate and 4 to 7 percent on a truck corridor. In Texas, which builds continuous frontage roads, half of the sites within 0.6 miles of an interstate are within about 650 feet of it and half are on a corridor. In Maryland and New Jersey a quarter are within about 650 feet, and in Maryland one in ten is on a corridor. The eastern fuel site sits a block past the ramp, where the trucks that pass it are the ones that have already left the freeway.

Near the interstate is not a diesel credential. In the Northeast the fuel site sits a block past the ramp while the trucks stay on the freeway; in Texas it sits on the frontage road in full view of them. Two sites the same distance from an interchange can have entirely different diesel prospects.

Cite this chart: G2M Insights, "Where the Diesel Opportunity Sits," G2M Fuel & Convenience Research, edition 2026-09-13-v15, g2m.ai/research/fuel-convenience/where-diesel-demand-sits.

A travel center is about three times as likely as a convenience site to sit on a corridor: 24 percent of travel centers do, against 9 percent of chain convenience sites and 7 percent of independents. But travel centers are fewer than two sites in a hundred, so they are 5 percent of the sites on truck corridors. The rest are convenience chains, independents and dealers under a supplier flag, in roughly equal thirds.

The metro ranking is therefore not a travel-center ranking. Los Angeles has 801 sites on truck corridors and 1 is a travel center; Reno has 56 and 1; Dallas-Fort Worth has 731 and 29. Amarillo is the exception in the top ten: 9 of its 45 corridor sites are travel centers on Interstate 40. Everywhere else the fuel site positioned to intercept the trucks is a convenience store, independent or dealer.

The fuel retail in front of the trucks is mostly not built for them. Nineteen of every twenty corridor sites are convenience stores, independents and dealers, and most run as ordinary stores. That is where the unclaimed diesel opportunity sits, and where a travel center's next competitor comes from.

Cite this chart: G2M Insights, "Where the Diesel Opportunity Sits," G2M Fuel & Convenience Research, edition 2026-09-13-v15, g2m.ai/research/fuel-convenience/where-diesel-demand-sits.

TA, Pilot Flying J and Love's are the only networks with a fifth or more of their sites on a truck corridor, at 40, 26 and 21 percent, and 68 to 96 percent of their sites are within 0.6 miles of an interstate. TA is the most corridor-bound of the three: nearly one site in four faces more than 10,000 trucks a day. Among convenience networks, the company-operated ampm and Thorntons sites are the most exposed at 18 percent, then Costco at 16, Walmart at 13 and Maverik at 11. 7-Eleven and Circle K, the two largest networks, are at 8 and 7 percent. Casey's, Kwik Fill, Stewart's Shops and Kwik Trip, whose sites are in small towns and off the freight routes, are at 2 to 3 percent; Kroger's grocery fuel sites at 4.

These figures describe only the sites an operator's own store locator lists, so a brand carried from a map feed cannot inflate a network's figure. Kwik Trip's figure is a floor: Wisconsin reports truck counts on fewer of its major roads than any other state, and the median Kwik Trip site's busiest road carries no truck count at all. Parent groups are as published in this edition: Speedway counts under 7-Eleven, Flying J under Pilot, Smith's and Fred Meyer under Kroger. TA is shown on the 191 sites its own locator lists under that name; Petro and TA Express are listed separately in this edition and are not shown. Operators whose locators returned no records in this acquisition are not shown.

Every network has a natural level of truck exposure set by its format, and the sites worth a second look are the ones that break it. A small-town chain at 3 percent and a travel-center network at 30 are both normal. The convenience store on a freight corridor is the exception, and its chain may be running it as an ordinary store.

• Truck traffic on the busiest road within 650 ft:
• No road within 650 ft
• Up to 2,500 trucks a day
• 2,500 to 5,000
• 5,000 to 10,000
• More than 10,000

Cite this table: G2M Insights, "Where the Diesel Opportunity Sits," G2M Fuel & Convenience Research, edition 2026-09-13-v15, g2m.ai/research/fuel-convenience/where-diesel-demand-sits.

Five metros have no site on a truck corridor. Myrtle Beach and Lynchburg have no interstate within 0.6 miles of any site, and Wilmington almost none. Sioux Falls has Interstates 29 and 90 within 0.6 miles of 37 percent of its sites, but South Dakota's interstates report a median of 2,700 trucks a day, below the threshold; Wichita's Interstates 35 and 135 are the same story at 3,800. Myrtle Beach, Pensacola and Crestview have 12 to 17 percent of sites at the 2,500 mark: busy arterials with moderate truck traffic and no freight route.

Four of the ten are in the Carolinas. Wichita is last in this ranking and in the competition ranking.

In these metros the trucks either do not come or do not pass where the fuel is. Sioux Falls and Wichita have interstates within reach of a third of their sites and little freight on them. A diesel case there rests on local fleets and pickups, because there is no through traffic to capture.

Any ranking of this kind depends on how far from the road a site may be and on how many trucks make a corridor. We re-ranked the same metros with the radius at about 330 and 165 feet and the threshold at 2,500 and 10,000 trucks a day, and against the two supporting columns. The table shows the rank correlation of each with the published ranking; 1.00 would mean an identical list.

Cite this table: G2M Insights, "Where the Diesel Opportunity Sits," G2M Fuel & Convenience Research, edition 2026-09-13-v15, g2m.ai/research/fuel-convenience/where-diesel-demand-sits.

The radius matters more than the threshold. At about 650 feet 11,522 sites are on a corridor, at about 330 feet 5,100 and at about 165 feet 1,462, because the road inventory draws the interstate as its centerline and a fuel site at the ramp is roughly 200 to 590 feet from it. At 165 feet Amarillo falls from 24 percent to none and Dallas-Fort Worth from 24 to under 1, which is a statement about frontage roads, not about trucks. At 10,000 trucks a day the list re-sorts toward the heaviest interstates: Waco on Interstate 35 is first, Stockton on Interstate 5 second, and Reno, whose Interstate 80 carries 9,000 to 12,000 trucks a day, drops to 25th. 2.7 percent of sites have no inventoried road within about 650 feet and count as not on a corridor; ranking on the matched sites alone gives the same order.

The limit that can move a rank is a missing truck count. States report truck traffic on nine interstate segments in ten nationally, but on about three in four in Maryland and Pennsylvania and four in five in Connecticut, North Carolina and Ohio. A site whose busiest road is a freeway without a truck count cannot be flagged. That describes 0.6 percent of sites nationally, but 8 percent in Scranton, 6 percent in New Haven, 5 percent in Harrisburg and 3 to 4 percent in Allentown, Lancaster, Pittsburgh and Winston-Salem, whose shares are therefore floors. Six sites have a segment within about 650 feet whose reported truck traffic exceeds its total and is capped; none of them takes its flag from that segment.

• The freight is national; the exposed fuel retail is not. Heavy freight crosses Tennessee, Ohio and Florida as much as it does Utah and Texas, but only in the West and Texas does the fuel site sit on the road the trucks use. In the typical metro 7 percent of sites face the freight; in Reno, Los Angeles and Salt Lake City more than a quarter do.
• Truck exposure is a site property, not a market property. Metro size barely moves it: 200-site Reno and Ocala rank above New York, Atlanta and Chicago. The diesel opportunity is found and priced one site at a time.
• Near an interstate is not in front of its trucks. In the Northeast the fuel site sits a block past the ramp and the trucks stay on the freeway; in Texas it sits on the frontage road in full view of them.
• The site in front of the trucks is usually a convenience store. Nineteen of every twenty corridor sites are convenience stores, independents and dealers, most of them not built for trucks. That is where the unclaimed diesel opportunity sits, and where a travel center's next competitor comes from.
• Format sets the norm; the exceptions are the story. Travel-center networks run at a fifth to two fifths of sites on a corridor, convenience chains far lower. The convenience store on a freight corridor breaks its chain's pattern, and it may be run as an ordinary store.

These are exposure findings from public site records and the federal road inventory. They locate where a site has trucks in view; they do not say how many stop, what any site sells or earns, and they are not volumes or market shares.