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North American
Transportation Statistics Interchange
The Interchange is a forum established in 1991 for the
exchange of information and the initiation of collaborative activities amongst
the transportation and statistical federal agencies in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Its mission is to raise the
general awareness and improve the quality, relevance, and comparability of
transportation data and information in North America. The overarching goal of the Interchange is
to promote and develop high quality, relevant, comparable data, and analysis
that provide information necessary for an efficient and fully integrated
transportation system for North America.
One of the key results of the Interchange was the trilateral
development and release of the North American Transportation
in Figures report in 2000. Canada, Mexico, and the United States have updated this information as inputs to the
North American Transporation Statisitics Database that supplies public access to relevant, timely and comparable transportation indicators for North America released in September of 2004.
The lead agencies for the Interchange are the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S.
Army Corp of Engineers, U.S. Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Bureau of
Transportation Statistics (BTS), Ministry of Communications and Transport (MX),
Mexican Institute of Transportation, National Institute of Statistics,
Geography and Informatics (MX), Statistics Canada, and Transport Canada.
Currently, the Interchange
conference locations rotate between the three countries every three years. BTS, the U.S. Census Bureau and
Transportation Research Board hosted the 17th
North American Transportation Statistics Interchange, in June 10-12
of 2003 in Washington DC. Every year there is a different level of emphasis and focus
to the plenary session. This year, the
four main topics were freight, economics, aviation and security. In addition, there was an overall theme of
strategic planning as the lead agencies and representatives engaged in a
strategic planning process during the past year to align the activities of the
Interchange with their domestic missions and activities in each of the three
countries.
There are four working groups as
part of the Interchange:
- North American Transportation
Statistics
working group - developing a core set of comparable and timely
transportation performance measures for North America and the inclusion of these in an online database
developed by Mexico.
- Maritime and Trade working group - vessel and port classification issues
and consistency in these for North America, customs issues, trade data
reconciliation and support of maritime data needed for the online
database.
- Environment and Energy working group - developing a comparable set of
indicators in environment and energy as they relate to transportation
across North
America and
the exchange of best practice and program updates.
- Surface Transportation working group - freight surveys and
collection approaches in North America and the expansion of these across
all three countries, measurement of border delays and efficiencies, hazmat
freight issues, North American geospatial data, and North American passenger
travel data.
BTS is the lead U.S. DOT agency for North American transportation and
statistics data coordination and partners at the U.S. federal level with the U.S. Census
Bureau and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
BTS is the only agency within the U.S. DOT that addresses transportation
data on a trilateral basis filling data gaps associated with North American
trade and travel. The Interchange and
its related activities provide major contributions to BTS products and other
U.S. DOT projects.
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