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U.S. Department of Transportation U.S. Department of Transportation Icon United States Department of Transportation United States Department of Transportation

BOX 9-A Accomplishments in the Last Year

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Since publication of the 2012 Transportation Statistics Annual Report, several major products and programs moved forward:

  • Working with the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) released preliminary results from the 2012 Commodity Flow Survey of freight shipments and began work on final results, including a new public use microdata file. 1

  • To make statistics more accessible and understandable, BTS launched a Facts and Figures series with joint publication of Freight Facts and Figures with the Federal Highway Administration and release of the first edition of Passenger Travel Facts and Figures.

  • Having demonstrated the value of the Confidential Close Calls Reporting System, BTS expanded the activity from a pilot to a permanent program supporting a major railroad, a transit system, and the offshore oil extraction industry.

  • The National Transportation Library, a part of BTS, led development of a web portal to all of the department’s publicly available data as part of the government-wide Open Data Initiative.

  • The U.S. Department of Transportation continues to work with state departments of transportation and other stakeholders to implement the performance measurement requirements of MAP-21—the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (P.L. 112-141).

  • States are expanding locational information submitted to the FHWA to include all public roads for improved safety analysis and other purposes.

  • BTS sponsored a Transportation Research Board task force on the Value of Transportation Infrastructure to develop improved statistics on the value of transportation to the economy and the quality of life.

  • The Bureau of Economic Analysis significantly re-engineered the systems it uses to calculate the National Accounts, providing BTS with new data to update its Transportation Satellite Account. BTS also devised a new strategy for organizing and enhancing the mandated Intermodal Transportation Database.

  • The Department of Transportation is working with the Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and other agencies to reinstate a modernized and updated Vehicle Inventory and Use Survey (VIUS). Last conducted in 2002, the VIUS is of critical importance to federal and local agencies and
    provides essential information for the analysis of safety and risks, fuel consumption, economic productivity, environmental impacts of transportation, highway usage and cost, and more.

1 Microdata is detailed data on more than 4 million individual responses to survey questions.