1.0 INTRODUCTION
The Office of Freight Management and Operations of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is responsible for the development of the Freight Analysis Framework (FAF) including the commodity origin-destination (O-D) database. FAF integrates data from a variety of sources to estimate commodity flows and related freight transportation activity among states, regions, and major international gateways. The commodity O-D database contains commodity flows between domestic origins and destinations, exports between domestic origins and foreign destinations and the port of exit, and imports between foreign origins and domestic destinations via a port of entry. Each record contains zone of origin, zone of destination, port of entry or exit (which applies only to export and import flows), type of commodity, mode of transportation for domestic portions of the flow, value in millions of dollars, and tons in thousands of short tons.
The FAF commodity O-D database lays the foundation for transportation infrastructure analysis. With regard to the first generation of the FAF, FHWA relied upon data provided by private and proprietary sources. However, this arrangement limited the data usage to United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) only. State DOTs and local metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) do have access to the products from the usage of these data but not to the data itself.
To overcome the limitations of FAF's commodity data issue, FHWA developed the next generation of the FAF known as FAF2. The commodity O-D data used in developing FAF2 data are based on the 2002 Commodity Flow Survey (CFS) and a host of other public data sources. For data quality reasons, FAF2 freight flow O-D coverage is limited to 131 freight analysis zones that include 114 CFS freight O-D zones and 17 major ports, border crossings, and freight ports.
In an attempt to make the FAF into a useful tool for measuring and analyzing the changing world of freight transportation, FHWA began developing annual provisional estimates of commodity movements including all modes of transportation starting with 2005. The goal is to provide practitioners in the area of economic development and transportation planning with the latest update – provisional data on goods movement. For example, the provisional estimate for calendar year 2006 was released early 2007; and the provisional estimate for 2007 was early 2008. The provisional estimates are developed based on publicly available freight data sources and methods that can be fully disclosed to the general public.
This report presents a description of the public data sources and methodologies for extracting freight information from yearly, quarterly, and monthly publicly available publications for the current year or past years and to generate provisional estimates of freight movement by mode for the current year.
1.1 Report Organization
The remainder of the report is organized as follows. Note that for each mode of transport, both domestic and international movements are included.
Chapter 2 presents the data sources and methodology used in developing the provisional estimates of volume and value of freight movement by highway. International movements by land border crossings include import and export between the U.S. and Mexico, and between the U.S. and Canada via land border crossings.
Chapter 3 presents the data sources and methodology used in developing the provisional estimates of volume and value of freight movement by air. International movements by air include international air cargo covering both import and export.
Chapter 4 presents the data sources and methodology used in developing the provisional estimates of volume and value of freight movement by rail. International movements by rail include all rail shipments to and from Canada, Mexico, and countries outside North America that sue rail for the domestic portion of the movement.
Chapter 5 presents the data sources and methodology used in developing the provisional estimates of volume and value of freight movement by water. International movements by water include import and export between the U.S. and the other seven international trade regions via seaports.
Chapter 6 presents the data sources and methodology used in developing the provisional estimates of volume and value of freight movement by pipeline. International movements by pipeline include import and export between the U.S. and the other seven international trade regions via seaports.
Chapter 7 describes the compilation of the provisional databases. Chapter 8 presents the conclusions of this methodology report, and Chapter 9 lists the works consulted and cited. An appendix compares selected data sources and forecasts, and contains supporting data in international air freight data.
