Release Note

BTS is withholding the scheduled release of the passenger and combined indexes for January. The passenger index is a statistical estimate of airline passenger travel and other components based on historical trends up to December 2019. As a result, the estimates have yet to fully account for the impact of the coronavirus. Air freight is also a statistical estimate. Since air freight makes up a smaller part of the freight index, the freight TSI is being released as scheduled.

Description

Statisticians use the process of seasonal-adjustment to uncover trends in data. Monthly data, for instance, are influenced by the number of days and the number of weekends in a month as well as by the timing of holidays and seasonal activity. These influences make it difficult to see underlying changes in the data. Statisticians use seasonal adjustment to control for these influences.

Controlling of seasonal influences allows measurement of real monthly changes; short and long term patterns of growth or decline; and turning points. Data for one month can be compared to data for any other month in the series and the data series can be ranked to find high and low points. Any observed differences are “real” differences; that is, they are differences brought about by changes in the data and not brought about by a change in the number of days or weekends in the month, the occurrence or non-occurrence of a holiday, or seasonal activity.

Unemployment rate is the number of unemployed persons as a percent of the labor force. The Bureau of Labor Statistics produces industry estimates of nonfarm payroll employment as part of the Current Population Survey. Employment data are seasonally adjusted to remove the effects of normal seasonal variation.

Employed persons include people aged 16 years and older in the civilian noninstitutional population who did any work at all as paid employees; worked in their own business, profession, or on their own farm, or worked 15 hours or more as unpaid workers in an enterprise operated by a member of the family; and all those who were not working but who had jobs or businesses from which they were temporarily absent. The Bureau of Labor Statistics produces industry estimates of nonfarm payroll employment as part of the Current Population Survey.

Data and visualizations showing Airport and Airway Trust Fund and Harbor Maintenance and Inland Waterways Trust Fund balance.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration releases data on highway fatalities in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). Data for the most recent year are preliminary estimates.

This dataset contains monthly performance statistics for the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway system.

State and Port TransBorder Freight Data - January 2006 to July 2021

How many people are staying at home? How far are people traveling when they don’t stay home? Which states and counties have more people taking trips? The Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) now provides answers to those questions through our new mobility statistics.

The Trips by Distance data and number of people staying home and not staying home are estimated for the Bureau of Transportation Statistics by the Maryland Transportation Institute and Center for Advanced Transportation Technology Laboratory at the University of Maryland. The travel statistics are produced from an anonymized national panel of mobile device data from multiple sources. All data sources used in the creation of the metrics contain no personal information. Data analysis is conducted at the aggregate national, state, and county levels. A weighting procedure expands the sample of millions of mobile devices, so the results are representative of the entire population in a nation, state, or county. To assure confidentiality and support data quality, no data are reported for a county if it has fewer than 50 devices in the sample on any given day.

Trips are defined as movements that include a stay of longer than 10 minutes at an anonymized location away from home. Home locations are imputed on a weekly basis. A movement with multiple stays of longer than 10 minutes before returning home is counted as multiple trips. Trips capture travel by all modes of transportation. including driving, rail, transit, and air.

The daily travel estimates are from a mobile device data panel from merged multiple data sources that address the geographic and temporal sample variation issues often observed in a single data source. The merged data panel only includes mobile devices whose anonymized location data meet a set of data quality standards, which further ensures the overall data quality and consistency. The data quality standards consider both temporal frequency and spatial accuracy of anonymized location point observations, temporal coverage and representativeness at the device level, spatial representativeness at the sample and county level, etc. A multi-level weighting method that employs both device and trip-level weights expands the sample to the underlying population at the county and state levels, before travel statistics are computed.

These data are experimental and may not meet all of our quality standards. Experimental data products are created using new data sources or methodologies that benefit data users in the absence of other relevant products. We are seeking feedback from data users and stakeholders on the quality and usefulness of these new products. Experimental data products that meet our quality standards and demonstrate sufficient user demand may enter regular production if resources permit.

Overview
The IPCD is a nationwide database of passenger transportation terminals, with data on the availability of connections among the various scheduled public transportation modes at each facility. The IPCD data covers the following types of passenger transportation terminals/stops: 1. Scheduled airline service airports. 2. Intercity bus stations (includes stations served by regular scheduled intercity bus service such as Greyhound, Trailways, code sharing buses such as Amtrak Thruway feeder buses, supplemental buses that provide additional frequencies along rail routes, and airport bus services from locations that are outside of the airport metropolitan area). 3. Intercity and transit ferry terminals. 4. Light-rail transit stations. 5. Heavy-rail transit stations. 6. Passenger-rail stations on the national rail network served by intercity rail and/or commuter rail services. 7. Bike-share stations belonging to bike-share systems that are open to the general public, IT-automated, and station based (contain hubs to which users can grab and return a bike). The data elements describe the location of the above types of terminals as well as the availability of intercity, commuter, and transit rail; scheduled air service; intercity and transit bus; intercity and transit ferry services; and bike-share availability. Transit bus service locations are not specifically included in the database. However, the status of transit bus as a connecting mode is included for each bike-share facility in the database.

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics releases seasonally adjusted air traffic data based on monthly reports from commercial U.S. air carriers.