The Dept. of Transportation has unveiled a new software program, the Intermodal Bottleneck Evaluation Tool (IBET), designed to help spot bottlenecks in the transportation system and help detour traffic around them.
Designed by DOT's Officer of Intermodalism, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, FHWA's Office of Freight Management and Operations and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, IBET will help transportation planners examine five areas where bottlenecks occur: highway access to airports, rail terminals and seaports, as well as airport and seaport congestion.
IBET provides policy professionals with a tool to assess the demands of commerce on the national transportation system, giving them a “big picture view” of domestic and international freight flows. The program quickly combines geographic information systems with freight information to analyze where freight is flowing and where bottlenecks are or can be expected.
The software allows users to look at modal and intermodal networks, as well as modal trends and use patterns such as origin and destination. It provides rankings of demand and can depict historical long-term growth and use trends. For each bottleneck area, IBET can show domestic, import and export flows, as well as through-traffic by state of origin and destination.
