Survey of Current Business Transportation Section to be added to CMD

Many series found in the Transportation section of the discontinued Survey of Current Business will soon be added to CMD.  This section includes Public Transit Ridership, U.S. Air Carrier passenger revenue miles, cargo-ton miles, and mail-ton miles. It also includes information on U.S. Citizen departures to foreign lands and Foreigners visits and immigration to America.  A special feature of the Transportation section included an index of restaurant sales, hotel occupancy rates and average daily rates, and visits to National Parks. In line with the theme of hotel statistics, we have also decided to go forth and add a series of hotel construction. This series begins in 1919 and is offered at a monthly clip.

There have been and continue to be many challenges to updating this dataset, some of which is the desire to automate the updating of the series and some of which is dealing with awkward blank spots. If anyone has the monthly data on hotel occupancy from 1990 through 2006, it would be greatly appreciated. Also, the monthly data on foreign travel is missing a  crucial 5-year block between 1991 and 1996. The desire to keep the same variable definitions as those used in the SCB remains strong.

There are many interesting stories to be found in this data. For one example, international air freight collapsed and was replaced with a rise in the domestic share of freight transport.