BTS freight dashboard tracks rail, port, and truck conditions as of June 30, 2026

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics updated its Supply Chain and Freight Indicators dashboard on June 30, 2026, giving operations and logistics teams a unified view of conditions across U.S. ports, rail networks, truck corridors, and the transportation labor market. The dashboard is the output of a DOT interagency working group that pulls data from the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, Commerce, and Labor alongside DOT's own modal offices.

For supply chain directors and procurement teams, the dashboard is one of the few government-maintained tools that consolidates leading and coincident freight signals in a single place. The full dataset is available for direct download from BTS's open data portal, which means teams can pipe it into their own planning or visibility platforms without manual extraction.

Rail data restructured around CPKC merger

One structural change that operators relying on rail benchmarks need to account for: since May 2025, BTS has been publishing data for Canadian Pacific Kansas City as a combined railroad, replacing the separate Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern series that existed before the two carriers merged in April 2023. The legacy CP and KCS charts are frozen and will not receive future updates. Any trend analysis that spans the pre- and post-merger period requires stitching together two different data series.

The rail section of the dashboard tracks average train speed and terminal dwell time by railroad and by region. Dwell time, how long rail cars sit at terminal before moving, is a direct input to transit time reliability calculations. Elevated dwell is one of the earliest signals of network congestion before it shows up in spot rates or shipper complaints.

Port-area truck speed and the Planning Time Index

On the truck side, the dashboard tracks speeds and reliability at the ten worst interstate bottleneck locations nationally, plus dedicated views for the Port of Los Angeles-Long Beach and the Port of New York-New Jersey. The key metric is the Planning Time Index, calculated by the Federal Highway Administration from its National Performance Management Research Data Set. PTI is the ratio of 95th-percentile travel time to free-flow travel time within five miles of each port. A PTI above 1.0 means trucks must build buffer time into schedules; the higher the number, the worse the reliability.

The dashboard also breaks out LA-LB truck speed by time of day, which helps drayage planners identify shift windows that avoid the worst congestion. That granularity is more actionable than a daily average alone.

What the spot rate and labor data actually measure

Spot rate data on the dashboard comes from DAT, the largest clearinghouse for non-contract trucking loads. BTS notes explicitly that the spot market represents roughly one-tenth of total common carrier trucking volume. That context matters: spot rates move faster and more dramatically than contract rates, so using them as a proxy for total trucking cost will overstate volatility. Procurement teams negotiating annual contracts should treat the spot series as a leading directional indicator, not an absolute price reference.

The labor section covers job openings, hires, and separations across transportation, warehousing, and utilities, sourced from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. BTS flags that the data covers wage and salary workers only, excluding owner-operators and independent contractors. For fleets that rely heavily on contract drivers, the headline figures will undercount actual labor market tightness.

The Producer Price Index for trucking, also included, is indexed to December 2003 and collected monthly, giving procurement teams a longer-term cost baseline against which to evaluate current contract offers.

Port inside-the-gate visibility

The port section distinguishes between loaded import containers, loaded export containers, and empty export containers at select major ports. The empty export container aggregates cover LA-LB, NY-NJ, Oakland, Seattle-Tacoma, Port of Virginia, Charleston, Savannah, and Houston. Tracking empties separately is operationally significant: a buildup of empty containers at export ports signals an imbalance between import and export volumes that can restrict equipment availability for exporters.

Containership counts at anchor use live AIS data from the Maritime Administration, captured on Tuesday afternoons. BTS specifies these counts include only inbound vessels with anchored status that are not yet moored, excluding outbound ships. The containership capacity series switched from AIS-based data to CBP Vessel Management System data, which counts only vessels entering port for official cargo operations. That methodology change makes current figures lower than the prior series, so year-over-year comparisons that span the transition require adjustment.

What this means for your team

• Validate rail transit time assumptions against the CPKC dwell and speed series, and note that pre-May 2025 comparisons require reconciling the old CP/KCS series with the new CPKC data.
• Use the PTI breakdowns for LA-LB and NY-NJ, including time-of-day views, to refine drayage scheduling windows and build defensible buffer times into inbound shipment planning.
• Treat DAT spot rate data as a directional signal only; contract rate negotiations should be anchored to the PPI for trucking and your own carrier rate history.
• Download the full BTS dataset directly for integration into TMS or supply chain visibility platforms, the open data portal supports automated refresh without manual pulls.