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Acknowledgments US Department of Transportation - BTS

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specifications or equations, should refer to Kunze and Jablonski (Kunze and Jablonski 1998) or call the Office <strong>of</strong>Productivity and Technology at BLS.AccuracyBLS provides no measures <strong>of</strong> reliability. However, BLS makes an assumption that transportation outputs should bemeasured using the production <strong>of</strong> passenger-miles or freight-miles. Another school <strong>of</strong> thought might assume thatmany transportation firms or facilities are actually providing capacity rather than actual use. Thus, an argument canbe made that productivity should be based on capacity rather than use. In fact, this is how BEA measurestransportation output. To evaluate the BLS assumption, one study compared the two approaches by examining thedifferent growth rates produced by BLS and BEA and found that in 25 <strong>of</strong> 35 service industries, the differences arewithin one percentage point. For transportation, differences in growth rates across BLS and BEA estimates were twopercentage points or less (Kunze and Jablonski 1998).Beginning with 1997 data, the indices for bus and petroleum pipelines did not meet BLS publication standards andare considered less reliable than those for other modes. These industries had between 14,000 and 15,000employees, far below the 50,000-employee threshold established for transportation industries by BLS. However, theyboth met a basic test <strong>of</strong> variability <strong>of</strong> the annual percent changes in the output per hour measure.GOVERNMENT REVENUES AND EXPENDITURESTABLE 3-29 & 3-30. Federal, State, and Local Government <strong>Transportation</strong>-Related Revenues andExpenditures, Fiscal Year (Current and constant 1996 dollars)TABLE 3-31. Summary <strong>of</strong> <strong>Transportation</strong> Revenues and Expenditures from Own Funds and User Coverage,Fiscal Year (Current and chained 2000 $ millions)TABLE 3-32 & 3-33. Federal <strong>Transportation</strong>-Related Expenditures by Mode, Fiscal Year (Current and constant1996 dollars)TABLE 3-34. Cash Balances <strong>of</strong> the <strong>Transportation</strong>-Related Federal Trust Funds, Fiscal YearThe main sources for federal-level data are the Budget <strong>of</strong> the United States Government and the Appendix to theBudget. These data are the actual figures as reported for the various transportation-related programs in theappendices <strong>of</strong> each year's budget document. 1 The figures are consistent from year to year and follow the definitionalstructure required by the Office <strong>of</strong> Management and Budget (OMB).Primary sources for state and local transportation-related revenues and expenditures data are censuses and surveyscollected by the U.S. Census Bureau. All units <strong>of</strong> government are included in the Census <strong>of</strong> Governments, which istaken at five-year intervals for years ending in 2 or 7, and these data are full counts, which are not subject tosampling error.State and local government data for noncensus years are obtained by annual surveys, which are subject to samplingerror. For U.S. totals <strong>of</strong> local government revenues and expenditures in this report, sampling variability is less than 3percent.Federal figures in this report correspond to the federal fiscal year, which begins on October 1, while state and localdata are for fiscal years that generally start in July. While this may create a small error in totals for any given year, thedata are suitable for illustrating trends in public transportation finance. Programs terminated before 1985 areexcluded from the tables. The totals for transportation revenues and expenditures in this report are the sum <strong>of</strong> theCensus Bureau's state and local numbers plus the total <strong>of</strong> the federal numbers.The source <strong>of</strong> the chained dollar deflators is The National Income and Product Account Tables, Bureau <strong>of</strong> EconomicAnalysis, table 7.1, "Quantity and Price Indexes for Gross Domestic Product." All inflation-adjusted data are for thebase year 1996, instead <strong>of</strong> 1992 as in previous editions <strong>of</strong> National <strong>Transportation</strong> Statistics. Note that deflators usedfor the federal data differ from those used for state and local data. Thus, if expenditures are totaled across differentlevels <strong>of</strong> government in chained dollars before and after federal grant transfers, the totals will not match.

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