This chapter contains sources for data on all modes of transportation—public transportation, private motor vehicles, trains, airplanes, ships, and even pipelines—moving both people and cargo. Some data about automobile production and sales is included in this chapter, but additional data about the automotive industry can be found in the sources in chapter 10. Data about transportation fatalities are included in this chapter. For data on fuels used for transportation, see chapter 18.
Major Sources: United States
Bureau of Transportation Statistics (U.S. Department of Transportation)
The Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS, www.rita.dot.gov/bts/), part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, publishes detailed statistics on the movement of both people and cargo, both within the United States and across its borders. The BTS site can be used to access not just BTS data but also data reported by other units of the federal government, such as highway statistics from the Federal Highway Administration, air travel data from the Federal Aviation Administration, and statistics on maritime transportation from the Maritime Administration. Because the BTS does not host the data reported by other agencies, only links to it, the site can be confusing for novice users; each agency presents its own data in a different interface and format. The total amount of aggregate data and statistics available is, however, vast. It includes information about such subjects as the number of miles of roads in the United States and the number of passengers flying annually along with detailed data about delayed and canceled flights, the funding of public transit systems, and the busiest days for ferry trips, to name just a few. Historical data is available; some of the highway statistics are available back to the 1940s, and data about aircraft accidents is available back to 1962, for example.
Major Sources: World
United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean
United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Pacific
United Nations Economic Commission for Europe
The United Nations does not have an agency equivalent to the U.S. Department of Transportation and does not report statistics on most transportation-related topics in UNdata or other centralized sites, but three of the regional United Nations Economic Commissions do gather and disseminate transportation statistics.
The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), through its CEPALSTAT database (http://estadisticas.cepal.org), reports total number of motor vehicles, number of motor vehicles per 100 residents, total length of roads in the country, total length of railways in the country, and three indicators of the volume of air traffic: total number of kilometers flown, number of passenger-kilometers flown, and ton-kilometers of freight flown.
Similarly, the Economic Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) has a Data Centre (www.unescap.org/stat/data/) with indicators such as density of roads and railroads, percentage of roads that are paved, number of cars per 1,000 residents, raw number of highway deaths and number per 100,000 residents, kilometers of road in the country that are part of the Asian Highway network, volume of cargo and passenger traffic on railroads, and volume of shipping containers being loaded and unloaded at ports in the country.
The Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) Statistical Database (http://w3.unece.org/pxweb/Dialog/) includes detailed country-level statistics on the movement of people and goods by motorcycles, passenger cars, buses, trains, and boats; number, age, engine size, load capacity, and fuel (diesel, gasoline, electricity, natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas, or other) of various types of vehicles (cars, buses, trucks, motorcycles); length of various types of roads and the length and density of various types of railways; traffic accidents, broken down by the conditions, type of accident, and more, as well as statistics on number of deaths and injuries per 100,000 automobiles; number and power of electric, diesel, and steam locomotives; number, age, and carrying capacity of boats and ships; and number and gender of people employed by railroads, either in administration or operations. Most data goes back to the early 1990s.
Minor Sources
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
For developed countries, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s OECD.StatExtracts (http://stats.oecd.org) contains national-level data similar to that found in the United Nations Economic Commission databases, including annual passenger-kilometers by various types of transportation (train, car, and bus); annual freight ton-kilometers by rail, roads, inland waterways (rivers, lakes, canals, etc.), seas, and oil pipelines; number and tonnage of containers transported by sea and by rail; and number of road accidents causing injuries, number of people injured, and number of people killed. One advantage of OECD.StatExtracts is that most of this data is available back to 1970.
Census Bureau (U.S. Department of Commerce)
Over the years the Census Bureau has asked several questions, first on the Decennial Census long form and now on the American Community Survey, about people’s commuting patterns. These questions include what type of transportation people use to get to work, how long their commute takes, what time they leave for work at the beginning of their day, and where their job is located.1 Because of the geographic detail of this type of data, it can be useful for people interested in studying local rush-hour traffic patterns. See chapter 2 for more information about accessing data from the Census Bureau.
A discontinued data series from the Census Bureau, the Vehicle Inventory and Use Survey (www.census.gov/svsd/www/vius/products.html; formerly known as the Truck Inventory and Use Survey), is still a valuable source for those interested in historic data about transportation in the United States. This survey asked the owners of trucks—a category that includes pickup trucks, minivans, and sport utility vehicles as well as commercial vehicles such as tractor-trailers, dump trucks, and cargo vans—questions about the vehicle’s physical characteristics and about how it was acquired, used, and maintained. Microdata—individual users’ responses to the survey questions—is available every five years from 1977 to 2002, and aggregate data is also available for 1963 and 1967.
Public Transportation Data
Several cities, both in the United States and abroad, have made their own public transit data publicly available. Two kinds of transit data are commonly shared: data on stops, routes, and schedules; and ridership statistics. The data on stops, routes, and schedules is typically disseminated in General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) format, which was developed to make it easy for apps and websites to make use of this data to help people plan their trips. The inclusion of latitudes and longitudes for stations and bus stops allows this data to be used in GIS software. Extensive lists of transit data available in GTFS format are available on the GTFS Data Exchange site (www.gtfs-data-exchange.com) and on the GoogleTransitDataFeed project (http://code.google.com/p/googletransitdatafeed/). Some cities, such as San Francisco (https://data.sfgov.org), also make available other geographically coded transportation information, such as the locations of parking meters and speed limits for streets. Chicago is a good example of a city that makes ridership statistics available; in the City of Chicago Data Portal (https://data.cityofchicago.org) one can find the exact number of people who rode a bus on any given bus route for any given day since January 1, 2001. That’s over half a million lines of data!
National Automobile Dealers Association
The automotive industry is a major part of the American economy with numerous associated industry groups, some of which publish statistics on their particular corner of the industry. These include the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA), which publishes annual NADA DATA reports (www.nada.org) covering such topics as sales of new cars, used cars, and parts and service; dealerships’ gross sales and net profits; vehicle inventories; numbers, types, and earnings of employees at dealerships; and dealership advertising methods and expenses. Much of this data is available at the state level, and new vehicle sales are available broken down by manufacturer. The reports from 2002 to present have been published online.
Organisation Internationale des Constructeurs d’Automobiles
Internationally, the Organisation Internationale des Constructeurs d’Automobiles (OICA, also known in English as the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers, http://oica.net), a trade association for automotive companies, collects statistics on the production of four classes of motor vehicles (passenger cars, light commercial vehicles, heavy commercial vehicles, and buses), broken down by country and by manufacturer, 1997 to present. OICA also publishes sales data, broken down by country and by cars versus all commercial vehicles, 2005 to present.
WardsAuto
WardsAuto (http://wardsauto.com) is one of the best private sources for data on the automotive industry, both in the United States and internationally. The vast majority of its data is available by subscription only, but a few useful historical data sets are available publicly: number of cars and trucks sold in the United States, 1931 to present (although data is missing for 1942–1950); number of cars and trucks produced in North America, 1951 to present; and the market share for thirty-seven different automotive companies, 1961 to present.
Note
1. The responses to the final question are typically recoded before they are released, usually into a variable such as whether they work in the same county or the same “place” (Census jargon for city, town, village, etc.) that they live.