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Welcoming Remarks

Dr. Ashish Sen, Director, Bureau of Transportation Statistics
First US-EU Transportation Statistics Interchange
Washington, DC
November 29, 2001

Good morning. I am Ashish Sen, the Director of the Bureau of Transportation Statistics here at the U.S. Department of Transportation. I am happy to welcome you to Washington and to BTS for what should be a major step forward in international data cooperation and I thank you for coming.

Meetings like these are hard to arrange and I thank those who worked hard to do so, especially Lisa Randall and Elijah Henley of BTS.

As you can see from the security precautions we now have here at DOT, much has changed in the past two months. As Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta said, "We have entered into a new era in transportation." As the Secretary said, "This is not business as usual."

From the data perspective, we have learned in the past few weeks how much we don't know—and how much more we need to know. And we have come to understand—more than ever before—the importance of globalization.

I have been looking forward to this meeting today and to our chance to extend the process we started last year to exchange data on an international scale.

Last year, we implemented that process with our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere. I hope today's meeting will be the start of a similar successful exchange of statistics and analysis between the U.S. and Europe.

We have already taken the first steps. I am pleased with the interaction and I am encouraged by our common interest. The work we will do today will move us further towards building the information infrastructure that will support both our regions.

I am sure we're all here because we all believe in the importance of transportation throughout our lives. In this department, we talk about the impact of transportation on safety, mobility, economic growth, human and natural environment and, more than most people realized, national security.

And when we look at economic growth, we see a transportation system which, as we say, "sustains America's economic growth." But we must also understand that the transportation system sustains the world's economic growth. Globalization happened, in large measure, because of efficiencies in transportation.

A thousand years ago, the largest city in the world was Ghor, which is in present-day Afghanistan, which was located on the caravan route. But, as sea trade replaced caravan trade, the great ports grew over the centuries. In this century, we have seen how communities grow around highways and, globally, how air commerce brings growth and development.

As the transportation system has become ever more complex since the days of the caravans, and as the world has changed with it, information becomes more important. Decision-makers in the public and private sectors face more and more decisions with far-reaching impacts and with high costs.

And it seems the time for making these big decisions is becoming shorter. They need more information and they need it to be available faster.

The good news is we are in the information business. If transportation is vital and if its future is to be charted by information, we are very important people.

Important people have to do important things and that is why we are here today.

We need to think continuously of data needs—not only at country levels—but at regional and international levels. We need to work together to develop a joint vision.

We need to keep asking questions like:

• Has the information we need to have about transportation kept pace with changes in all our countries?
• Do we have information on the right subjects?
• Is the information reliable, timely and comparable?
• Is the information understandable and accessible?
• What information gaps exist and how can they be addressed?

These are important issues that we should address together. But we must look 20 years into the future to when our world is even more interconnected and interrelated than it is today. We must no longer faced with so many individual country data definitions that they take up more space in the publications than the data.

Keep in mind that the decisions we make about data—and especially about data definitions—will determine how data are presented for years to come.

As we improve our international transportation data and analysis, we must get our definitions aligned. And we need to start soon. Straightening definitions will be hard enough without further hardening the issues by delay. Don't forget data definitions begin to have legal standing!

BTS is less than 10 years old but we have made significant progress on many of these questions on our domestic transportation system. We will work with you in the coming months and years to improve the level of data available throughout the international transportation community.

But it is time for us to get started on this ambitious process. Thank you again and welcome to the First US-EU Transportation Statistics Interchange.