Friday, June 22, 2012 - The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) and its counterparts in Canada and Mexico, along with other federal agencies, have signed an agreement to expand the joint development and maintenance of a comprehensive set of comparative transportation statistics for all modes of North American transportation. The Memorandum of Cooperation, signed at the 26th annual meeting of the North American Transportation Statistics (NATS) Interchange Forum in Washington, D.C., formalizes the two-decade effort of the Interchange, which has resulted in the NATS Online Database(link is external). With the new agreement, the three nations intend to increase collection and sharing of commonly understood and comparable transportation data and statistics for data-driven planning and performance measurement to improve cross-border integrated transportation planning and operations. It was signed by DOT Assistant Secretary for Aviation and International Affairs Susan Kurland on behalf of the Research and Innovative Technology Administration's Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Federal Highway Administration, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, Federal Railroad Administration, and the Maritime Administration, all of which are agencies of DOT. Also signing were the U.S. Census Bureau, Transport Canada, Statistics Canada, Mexico's Ministry of Communications and Transport, the Mexican Institute of Transportation, and the National Institute of Statistics and Geography of Mexic
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