U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta has announced the release of the Freight Analysis Framework (FAF), a database and analytical tool to help improve planning, operations and decision-making to better manage freight movement across the country.

"The smooth flow of freight in the United States and across its borders is vital to our economy," Secretary Mineta said. "The Freight Analysis Framework underscores the importance of freight movements to the nation's economy by providing government and the private sector with a valuable tool for analyzing the relationship between moving freight and congestion relief."
USDOT created the FAF, is a collaborative effort by the Department's Federal Highway Administration, the Federal Railroad Administration, the Federal Maritime Administration, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and the Secretary's Office of Intermodalism. The FAF examines four key transportation modes: highway, railroad, water and air. To evaluate the effect of expected volumes on the transportation network, FAF includes economic forecasts for 2010 and 2020. It translates these economic data into transportation demand and then assigns that demand to the networks.
The FAF is a policy analysis tool aimed at helping decision-makers to understand the geographic relationships between domestic and international trade flows and the nation?s intermodal transportation system. By using this tool, DOT says state and local government and the private sector can determine which transportation corridors are or will become heavily congested in the future and better plan solutions to help alleviate these bottlenecks in the intermodal transportation network.