Why is there a lack of Weight Data for Export Shipments?
The weight of U.S. exports by land modes of transportation is not available because this data is not required to be reported on the paper Shipper’s Export Declarations (SEDs) documents that are required by the U.S. Census Bureau. Currently 20-25 percent of export filings are still reported on paper. The new electronic filing system for exports, the Automated Export System or AES does require that export weight be filed for all modes of transportation. Once the level of paper filings is reduced and AES filings increase, particularly on the U.S.-Mexican border, RITA/BTS hopes to work with Census to add weight data for the U.S. exports by land modes of transportation. In the meantime, some customers use value to weight ratios for imports, and apply these to develop some crude approximations of export weight. In the meantime RITA/BTS uses value to weight ratio of U.S. imports at two digit commodity code to calculate the export weights. Although the export weights are not published as table
