Austin, Texas-based uShip announced the launch of the Transportation Price Index, a monthly report designed to track important data related to transportation costs.


Proprietary, transactional information from the uShip marketplace will be used to reveal U.S. economic trends specifically related to oil prices and other transportation industry expenditures. The TPI is expressed in terms of U.S. dollars per ton-mile.

CEO Matt Chasen explains the TPI is a statistical tool that will provide analysts, consumers and media with an entirely new economic indicator. "Internally, we have been tracking trends in transportation pricing since the beginning of 2007, and recently we decided to share this valuable information with those interested in understanding movements in the economy and our industry."

In the uShip marketplace, transactions are condensed to measures of price, weight and distance. Beginning this month, uShip will calculate the weighted-average of these prices across many categories of domestic shipments to determine the overall TPI figure. At the end of each month, uShip will release the latest TPI findings.

"While the overall number is useful for looking at macroeconomic trends, it is inherently biased by our changing category mix in the wide variety of commodities that are being shipped-from household goods to cars. Therefore, we allow people to filter the TPI by category to get a more accurate picture of how prices have changed for specific types of goods," Chasen says.

More info: www.transportationpriceindex.com