E-C158 Cover1 - Center for Transportation Analysis - Oak Ridge ...

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Understanding Freight Transportation
and the Role of Commodity Flow Survey
PETER APPEL
Research and Innovative Technology Administration
he CFS is a flagship of the work performed at the BTS and is critically important to
transportation decision making across both the private and public sectors. Because the
country is in a period of constrained resources, the transportation decisions that affect billions of
dollars need to be prioritized. Decisions need to be made on where to apply these very limited
resources to have the most impact on a transportation system that is integrated and complex.
These transportation decisions cannot be made effectively without looking at the entire
transportation network and the effect those decisions will have. Underlying facts, based on a
solid core of data, are necessary to make decisions about how to relieve bottlenecks in the
system, how and where to bolster the country’s network, and how to make the kind of
transportation investments that will have the most impact on trade flow, economic growth,
building the manufacturing base in the United States, and getting goods to market in the most
effective way possible. That solid base is the CFS.
A recent example of the need for and effective use of data occurred in the Transportation
Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant program which was overseen by the
U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT). Discretionary grants were awarded to applicants from
across the country for their potential for significantly impacting the national transportation
system. One such grant supports a significant enhancement to the CREATE (Chicago Region
Environmental and Transportation Efficiency) Program which is targeted to relieve rail
congestion around the Chicago area. The CREATE Program is not just a Chicago project even
though it involves building overpasses and rail lines in Chicago. It is a national program because
rail congestion through Chicago impacts the flow of commodities throughout this country as
demonstrated by information from the CFS.
The current CFS has been in existence for several iterations since its 1993 release. It is
continually being reevaluated and improved, taking advantage of current technologies, current
ways of doing business, and improved understanding of the ways in which shippers and carriers
store and transmit their data, always with the goal of obtaining the best possible high-quality data
using the best tools in the most cost-effective way. This workshop is the most recent effort to
solicit important feedback from the user community as plans for the next survey proceed. Input
from this workshop in combination with results and lessons learned from the 2007 CFS provides
the basis for these improvements.
The CFS that is currently in use is the result of a dedicated team at U.S. DOT, the
Census, and elsewhere. The resulting data and products are a masterful effort that involved very
different entities and information from a multitude of different sources which were pulled
together to define the important story about the state of commodity flow in this country today.
Moving forward, the team will build upon what was done right this time and upon the
technologies that are now available as well as input from users on what to improve, identification
of gaps and places where the CFS could provide more granularity and detail about commodities,
modes, or locations. This information is important for identifying ways in which the survey can
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