State and regional transportation planning agencies are increasingly recognizing the need for policies and programs addressing freight issues to ensure an efficient and reliable freight transportation system. A major challenge, however, remains the lack of available freight data to ensure informed decisions. State Departments of Transportation seem to (a) rely on the limited data compiled and published by federal agencies for aggregate analysis, (b) obtain one of the private commercial sources

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... f data related to freight movements, or (c) collect original data. The principal commercial data source currently is the Reebie TRANSEARCH database. The objective of this research product is to summarize the outcome of the research team's comprehensive review of available U.S. freight data sources -both public and commercial sources. The research team carefully reviewed the objectives, survey methods, assumptions, and limitations of each publicly available database, and the available documentation of commercial databases. In total, 31 databases were reviewed. This research product documents, in detail, the characteristics of the various databases, including sponsoring organization, performing organization, data collected, sampling method, survey method, quality control procedure, geographical coverage, frequency of updates, and the assumptions and limitations inherent to each data source.