Thursday, October 3, 2002
FHWA 41-02
Contact: Jim Pinkelman
Tel: 202-366-0660
Transportation Secretary Mineta Announces New Database
to Help Public, Private Sectors Analyze and Plan for Growing Freight Movement
U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta today announced the release of
the Freight Analysis Framework, a database and analytical tool that will help
improve planning, operations and decision-making to better manage freight
movement across the country.
“The smooth flow of
freight in the United States and across its borders is vital to our economy,”
Secretary Mineta said. “The
Freight Analysis Framework underscores the importance of freight movements to
the nation’s economy by providing government and the private sector with a
valuable tool for analyzing the relationship between moving freight and
congestion relief.”
USDOT estimates that the nation’s transportation system
by 2020 will handle cargo valued at almost $30 trillion, compared with $9
trillion today. Volumes, in tons,
will increase by nearly 70 percent over current levels of 15 billion tons.
The department also says that international freight volumes are growing
faster than domestic volumes and will almost double by 2020.
These huge increases in freight movement are and will continue to result in increased congestion and greater
inefficiencies throughout the nation’s transportation system.
To respond to this challenge, USDOT created the Freight Analysis
Framework (FAF), a collaborative effort by the Department’s Federal
Highway Administration, the Federal Railroad Administration, the Federal
Maritime Administration, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, and the
Secretary’s Office of Intermodalism.
The FAF examines
four key transportation modes: highway, railroad, water, and air.
To evaluate the effect of expected volumes on the transportation network,
FAF includes economic forecasts for 2010 and 2020.
It translates these economic data into transportation demand and then
assigns that demand to the networks.
The FAF is a policy analysis tool aimed at helping decision-makers to
understand the geographic relationships between domestic and international trade
flows and the nation’s intermodal transportation system.
By using this tool, state and local government and the private
sector can determine which transportation corridors are or will become heavily
congested in the future and better plan solutions to help alleviate these
bottlenecks in the intermodal transportation network
Additional information on the Freight Analysis Framework is available at the Office of Freight Management and Operations website, http://www.ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freight.
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