Data Spotlight: Taking the measure of 2021 in transportation

At the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, we produced a wide variety of charts and tables to understand transportation and its consequences in 2021. We selected three of those measures to highlight the year in transportation: Daily Trips, Domestic Flight Departures, and the Freight Transportation Services Index. If they tell one overall story for 2021, that story begins and ends with COVID-19.

As the chart above shows, the number of trips each week in 2021 (green) finally exceeded the corresponding number for 2019 (orange) starting in late October.