Book Description

The 1993 Commodity Flow Survey (CFS) collected shipment data from a sample of approximately 200,000 domestic business establishments. Each selected establishment provided information on origin, destination, commodity, shipment weight and value, and modes of transport for a sample of its outbound shipments. One data item not reported by CFS participants was shipment distance. This important piece of information was estimated by simulating probable routes using computer models of the highway, rail, air, waterway, and pipeline networks and their interconnections. This paper describes the nature of the shipment distance estimation problem, the procedures used to estimate mode-specific distances between origin and destination ZIP codes, and the techniques used to validate the results.