The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics released “Hazardous Materials Highlights – 2007 Commodity Flow Survey,” a summary of the movement of 2.2 billion tons of hazardous materials on the nation’s transportation network in 2007.
Slightly more than half (54 percent) of hazardous material by weight is moved by truck over highways. Pipeline is the next most-used carrier of hazardous materi¬als, handling 28 percent, while the other modes each accounted for 7 percent or less of the total.
The movement of hazardous materials through the transportation system represents almost 18 percent of total weight for all freight shipments as measured by the CFS, the primary source of national and state-level data on domestic freight shipments.
