Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS)
As the independent statistical agency within the Department of Transportation (D0T), the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) is a politically objective supplier of trusted and statistically-sound baseline, contextual, and trend information used to shape transportation policy, investments, and research across the US and abroad. BTS is the preeminent source of statistics on commercial aviation, multimodal freight, and transportation economics.
The Bureau’s National Transportation Library is the permanent, publicly accessible home for research publications from throughout the transportation community, the gateway to all DOT data, and the help line for the Congress, researchers, and the public for information about transportation. BTS is a leading source of timely, accurate, and reliable information on the U.S. transportation systems used for moving people and goods, and on their impacts on the economy, society and the environment.
Program Overview
BTS integrates data from a wide variety of sources, including its own data collections into three major products required by Chapter 63 of Title 49, United States Code, and makes those products available with other research reports through the National Transportation Library. BTS also links the many data programs throughout DOT with each other and with programs of the other National Statistical Agencies.
BTS data collections include traffic, passenger flow, employment, financial condition, and on-time performance of commercial aviation; the Commodity Flow Survey; transborder movement of freight by mode of transportation; a census of ferry operations, precursor safety data for transit operations, and data on near misses and equipment failures in offshore operations.
BTS compiles information from its surveys and from other federal agencies into products mandated by the Congress, including:
BTS helps coordinate DOT’s statistical programs and link them with other programs throughout the federal government through institutions such as the Advisory Committee on Transportation Statistics and the Interagency Committee on Statistical Policy. BTS also provides technical assistance on departmental publications such as the Performance and Accountability Report required by the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) (P.L. 103-62).
BTS is also the home of the National Transportation Library. The National Transportation Library serves as a repository for all DOT research as well as a portal to statistical information. The National Transportation Library provides information to the public through an 800 number, and also maintains the National Transportation Data Archive. The National Transportation Library works closely with the Office of the Chief Information Officer to assure public access to all DOT data through www.transportation.gov/data.
The mandate for U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) to collect and disseminate transportation statistics originates with the Department’s founding in 1966. This mandate has been pursued since then by individual operating administrations, each attempting to fill its own information needs with its own systems for data collection and statistical analysis. Attempts to develop a multimodal, coordinated data program during DOT’s first quarter century were not sustained.
The need for a more proactive program of data collection and analysis that bridged across the DOT's operating administrations was recognized in the Department’s Statement of National Transportation Policy, approved and released by the White House in February, 1990. Major data gaps identified in the Statement included statistics on domestic and international flows of freight and passenger traffic by all modes, the extent and performance of intermodal connections, the financial and operating characteristics of smaller carriers, and the costs of both for-hire and private transportation incurred by each sector of the economy. The Statement committed DOT to “develop a comprehensive assessment of data needs and priorities of the Department and the transportation community, [and] develop more effective and permanent institutional mechanisms within the Department to ensure that transportation-related data collected by different agencies can be effectively linked, to collect data on multimodal passenger and freight transportation flows, and to integrate and disseminate transportation-related data collected by DOT and other public agencies.”
As part of the National Transportation Policy effort, DOT funded a study of strategic data needs by the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings of the TRB study, published in Data for Decisions: Requirements for National Transportation Policy Making (Special Report 234), highlighted a wide range of data deficiencies and recommended: establishment of a data center within the DOT to provide the focal point for the compilation and integration of system wide transportation data; development of a national transportation performance monitoring system to track key indicators of the Nation's transportation system and its environment from the perspective of markets and users, with the results reported biennially; and funding of multimodal surveys of commodity and passenger flows.
Senate hearings on reauthorization of the surface transportation program, coincidentally scheduled just after the first meeting of the TRB study panel, included members of the panel to discuss transportation trends and issues. Panel members indicated how little was known about transportation trends given a 15-year decline in multimodal data collection. The message resonated with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who included provisions to create and fund the Bureau of Transportation Statistics in the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) that became law on December 18, 1991.
The National Transportation Library evolved out of a BTS information-sharing project and was initially recognized by Congress in the Department of Transportation Appropriations Act of 1997 passed in September 1996. The Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) made the National Transportation Library a permanent part of BTS in 1998.
The Congress placed BTS in the new Research and Innovative Technology Administration in 2005. The position of BTS Director, which had been a Senate-confirmed Presidential appointment, became a Secretarial appointee from the career civil service. BTS moved with the rest of the Research and Innovative Technology Administration to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Transportation for Research and Technology, as authorized in the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act on December 4, 2015. The FAST Act also created the port performance freight statistics program and strengthened the Bureau’s ability to produce statistical products free of political influence.
The history of issues covered by BTS is highlighted in Two Decades of Change in Transportation Reflections from Transportation Statistics Annual Reports 1994–2014.
(Link: https://www.bts.gov/learn-about-bts-and-our-work/history-bts)