Freight Analysis Framework 5/16/23 Updated

Tuesday, May 16, 2023

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) today released an updated version of its Freight Analysis Framework (FAF) commodity flow dataset, which provides estimates for tonnage, value, and ton-miles by origin-destination pair of FAF regions, commodity type, and mode for:

Base year (2017)
Annual estimates (2018–2021)
Forecast year estimates (2023–2050)
State-level historical trend estimates (1997–2012)

The release of FAF 5.5 is available at https://www.bts.gov/faf and includes new annual estimates for 2021. The foreign trade flows incorporate improvements to various imputation processes, including weight imputation, domestic mode imputation, and stateside geographic imputation for regions located on the Mexican and Canadian borders. The 2022 forecast from the 2017 base case (published in previous FAF releases) has been removed and will be replaced soon with 2022 preliminary estimates. Final 2022 annual estimates are scheduled for release in fall 2023. Updates to the 2018-2020 annual estimates will also be completed in the near future. In the FAF 5.5 release, the description of Standard Classification of Transported Goods (SCTG) 19 has been changed from "Coal, n.e.c." to "Natural gas and fossil products" to be more consistent with the commodities in this category.