BTS freight dashboard expands CPKC rail data as agencies track live supply chain stress points

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics published its latest Supply Chain and Freight Indicators update on July 7, 2026, and the most structurally significant change for rail shippers is now fully active: weekly metrics for Canadian Pacific Kansas City have replaced the separate Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern data series that the dashboard carried since its launch. BTS began receiving CPKC data in May 2025, about two years after the April 2023 merger closed, and the legacy CP and KCS charts are now static.

The shift matters for any operations team that uses the BTS dashboard to benchmark Class I rail performance. CPKC's cross-border network connecting Mexico, the U.S. Midwest, and Canada is now reported as a single entity, meaning dwell times, train speeds, and cars-on-line figures reflect the merged railroad's actual operating footprint rather than two partial pictures. Teams that built internal scorecards around the old CP or KCS series will need to recalibrate.

What the dashboard actually tracks

The BTS tool is an interagency product, pulling data from the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, Commerce, and Labor alongside DOT's own modal agencies. It organizes freight intelligence into four operational domains: port activity inside and outside the gate, freight movement volumes, and transportation costs and labor.

On the port side, the dashboard tracks loaded import and export container counts at major U.S. ports, empty export container repositioning, containership capacity calling at U.S. ports, and the number of vessels anchored offshore or waiting for berths. Containership capacity data now comes from U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Vessel Management System rather than AIS transponder data, a methodological shift BTS notes produces lower vessel counts because VMS only logs ships entering port for an official purpose.

Outside the port gate, rail metrics cover average train speeds, terminal dwell times, and cars on line, broken out by region and by railroad. Truck metrics focus on ten Interstate bottleneck locations and the immediate highway corridors around the Port of Los Angeles-Long Beach and the Port of New York-New Jersey, using Federal Highway Administration speed and Planning Time Index data. PTI is the ratio of 95th-percentile truck travel time to free-flow travel time, making it a direct proxy for reliability rather than just average congestion.

Cost and labor signals in one place

The cost and labor section is where procurement and HR operations teams will find the most actionable reads. The dashboard publishes truck spot rates by equipment type from DAT, which BTS notes represents roughly one-tenth of the overall for-hire trucking market. That fraction matters: spot rate movement is a leading indicator of contract rate pressure, not a direct read on what shippers under long-term contracts are currently paying.

Producer Price Index series for both trucking and diesel fuel sit alongside the spot data, giving category managers a way to separate fuel-driven cost shifts from broader capacity dynamics. Barge rates on downbound grain corridors and container freight rates on 40-foot boxes between the U.S. Midwest, U.S. West Coast, and Shanghai complete the rate picture, covering the primary intermodal corridors for agricultural and manufactured goods.

Labor data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, segmented for the Transportation, Warehousing, and Utilities sector. The dashboard tracks openings, hires, and separations monthly, with quits used as a signal of workforce confidence. A separate series covers non-farm truck transportation payroll employment and warehousing and storage employment. BTS is explicit that all employment figures exclude owner-operators and independent contractors, a meaningful omission for any team trying to assess total trucking capacity.

Baselines and benchmarking

Several series are indexed to 2019, including the Freight Transportation Services Index and interstate vehicle miles traveled, which gives operations teams a pre-pandemic baseline for comparison. The inventory-to-sales ratio and personal consumption expenditures on durable goods are included as demand-side context, useful for anticipating whether freight volumes are likely to soften or build in coming months.

The full dataset is downloadable from the BTS research portal, allowing teams to pull raw figures into their own models rather than relying on the dashboard's Tableau visualizations. BTS notes that all figures are provisional and have not been reviewed for full statistical representativeness. Current-week port capacity figures are estimates subject to revision as late-arriving data is received.

What this means for your team

• Update any internal rail scorecards that referenced CP or KCS separately: those series are now frozen. Pull CPKC metrics for train speed, dwell time, and cars on line to maintain continuity on cross-border rail lanes.
• When using truck spot rate data from the dashboard, note the DAT figures represent spot market activity only. Pair them with the PPI trucking series to distinguish fuel cost changes from capacity-driven rate moves before entering contract negotiations.
• For port corridor planning around LA-LB or NY-NJ, use the Planning Time Index alongside average truck speed. PTI captures reliability variance that average speed alone can mask, particularly for time-sensitive delivery windows.
• Download the raw BTS dataset directly for integration into your own supply chain visibility tools, rather than depending on the Tableau dashboard, which has experienced availability issues.