DOT Displays Computer Tool To Identify Freight Bottlenecks

Contact Bill Mosley 202-366-5571

Tuesday, January 9, 2001 -- The U.S. Department of Transportation's Office of Intermodalism and Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) today demonstrated a personal computer tool to assist public sector freight planners in identifying and assessing current and likely major freight bottlenecks in our national transportation systems.

The new program created by BTS with the Office of Intermodalism, the Office of Freight Management and Operations of the department's Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory will help planners address five categories of bottlenecks--highway seaport access, seaport congestion, highway/airport access, airport congestion, and highway/rail terminal access.

"Getting goods to market efficiently is critical to our nation's economy, and this program will help ensure that we have the tools we need to keep our freight moving," said U.S. Transportation Secretary Rodney E. Slater.

In unveiling the Intermodal Bottleneck Evaluation Tool (IBET), Associate Deputy Transportation Secretary Stephen D. Van Beek, said, "IBET is an important first product in the effort to provide policy professionals with an analytical tool to assess the demands of our nation's commerce on the national transportation systems. It provides policy professionals with a big picture view of our nation's domestic and international freight flows."

Dr. Ashish Sen, BTS Director, said, "IBET is an effort to make data-based decision tools publicly available in the near future for those who can make transportation better. In this way, we hope to add transparency to decisions."

IBET can quickly combine Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and large informational data bases developed through FHWA's Freight Analysis Framework to analyze where freight is flowing in the nation and where bottlenecks are or can be expected.

It combines data on freight volumes with measures of available infrastructure, intensity of infrastructure use, observed traffic delays, and significance of facilities to domestic and international trade to show the existence of bottlenecks. It then distributes the freight flow information over the national transportation networks and, using GIS, assigns this freight over the nation's highway, rail, maritime, and aviation networks.

IBET allows users to look at both modal and intermodal networks, as well as modal trends and use patterns such as origin and destination. It provides rankings of demand based on certain limited factors and can depict historical long term growth and use trends. For each bottleneck area, IBET can show domestic, import, and export flows, as well as through traffic by states of origin and destination.