About

Several avenues were explored in an effort to get meaningful measures of freight activities to include in the indicator web page. This included approaching several researchers who are working on various freight related analyses and modeling efforts. Public planning initiatives have shown a far greater interest in freight transportation and the impacts it has on transportation infrastructure needs over the past several years and various efforts are underway to improve the data bases and planning methods that can be used to address freight transportation and the impacts it has on transportation infrastructure needs and performance. However, the private sector dominance of the freight industry and the proprietary nature of this competitive business combined with the limited amount of time that the public planning sector has been interested in this subject area, results in there being very limited data for the indicators page. Many of the analysis efforts are using survey data to build a richer understanding of the nature and composition of the freight transportation sector. This data is not real time data and is not updated on a regular frequency. Freight transportation is also multimodal and lacks particularly reliable measures. Historical measures for aspects of freight transportation, such as port activities, exist in both quantity and dollar values depending on the nature of the commodity. After several discussions and considerations, sales of diesel fuel was determined to be the most viable indicator of the type that would be of interest to readers of the indicator web page. This is felt to be a reasonable surrogate indicator of truck activity, the dominant freight transportation mode. Additional information on freight activity is captured through port activity or can be gathered via other indicators, such as airfreight activities.

Contact Information:

National Energy Information Center

Phone: (202) 586-8800

InfoCtr@eia.doe.gov