Today, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) launched the first of several new experimental statistics related to freight mobility based on a national database of processed Global Positioning System (GPS) data harvested from a sample of over 350,000 trucks. This inaugural metric, available for download from the BTS website, estimates the median county-to-county travel times experienced by those vehicles as they moved around the country during 2023. 

The first metric developed from this program, known officially as the BTS American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) Freight Mobility Initiative (FMI), it provides users with the median, twenty-fifth percentile, and seventy-fifth percentile travel times observed by the subset of trucks seen moving between each unique pairing of the more than 3,000 counties in the United States. Accompanied by a binned count of the number of instances a truck was seen moving between those counties, this product provides users with a novel perspective on national-level, long-distance freight mobility. 

Figure 1. Median Travel Times for Freight Trucks Departing Cook County, IL

BTS will use the rich location and temporal information contained in the BTS ATRI FMI database to prepare and release additional national-level statistics related to freight fluidity, calling attention to other trends and patterns observed in its continuous collection of processed GPS data. As new or updated products based on these data are prepared and finalized, BTS will share them with the public and solicit feedback on their usefulness for statistical analysis and research and to inform national transportation, planning, policy, and investments related to freight.