Trips by Distance data with additional county transportation statistics

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law contains billions in transportation funding. This report breaks that funding down by mode.

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.

Three freight indicators tracking weekly compared to a pre-COVID-19 baseline

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.

Trips by Distance data with additional county transportation statistics

The report covers transportation-related financial activities of the federal,
state and local governments, as well as government enterprises
(e.g., public transit agencies, toll highways, parking lots, air terminals,
etc) that finance most of their outlays by providing services to the public.
The report focuses on the role of the government as transportation
infrastructure system provider and its financial activities pertaining to
this function. The financial activities of the government as user of the
transportation system are not included except when these activities are
directly relevant to its role as provider of the transportation
infrastructure. The following broad categories of data are provided in this
report: Federal revenues and expenditures by mode and program for
FY 1985-2000. Federal grants to state and local governments by mode for
FY 1985-2000. Federal budget authority and obligations by mode and program
for FY 1985-2000. State government revenues and expenditures by mode for
the fifty states for FY 1985- 1999.