BTS Supply Chain Pressure & Freight Indicator Monitor

Monitor the newest changes across the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics' official Supply Chain and Freight Indicators dataset. The Actor converts a large mixed-cadence public dataset into current, filterable change records for logistics dashboards and monitoring workflows.

What it covers

• Port vessel capacity, anchored ships, and berth queues
• Rail traffic, speed, dwell, and cars online
• Truck bottleneck speed and planning-time measures
• Diesel prices, grain-barge rates, and ocean freight rates
• Transportation employment, openings, imports, exports, and demand indicators

How it works

1. Downloads selected fields from the official BTS Socrata API without authentication or a proxy.
2. Validates that the source still contains at least 10,000 rows and remains below a 50,000-row safety limit.
3. Groups observations by indicator plus both series dimensions.
4. Compares each series' own latest two observations, which correctly handles weekly, monthly, and other cadences together.
5. Applies age, text, direction, change-threshold, and result-limit filters.
6. Writes stable, provenance-rich change records to the default dataset and a SUMMARY record to the key-value store.

Input

Field	Default	Description
indicatorContains	empty	Text filter across indicator and series dimensions
directions	all	pressure, easing, or neutral
maxAgeDays	120	Exclude stale series
minAbsoluteChange	0	Minimum absolute delta; 0 disables it
minPercentChange	0	Minimum absolute percentage delta; 0 disables it
maxResults	200	Bounded output limit from 1 to 1,000

When both change thresholds are enabled, a record passing either threshold is included.

Output

Each item contains a stable recordKey and seriesId, indicator and series dimensions, the newest and previous observation dates and values, absolute and percentage changes, a conservative directional label, units, the original BTS source description, official dataset/API URLs, and retrieval time.

Directional labels

Labels use a deliberately narrow naming convention. Higher queues, anchored vessels, dwell, prices, rates, costs, and planning-time measures are labeled pressure; declines are labeled easing. Higher speed, capacity, throughput, employment, imports, exports, and vehicle activity are labeled easing; declines are labeled pressure. Everything else remains neutral.

These labels do not establish causality and are not forecasts, investment advice, safety guidance, or operational guarantees.

Source and reuse

The source is the official BTS Supply Chain and Freight Indicators dataset. Its metadata identifies the dataset as public U.S. government information under the U.S. Public Domain label. Individual series may be provisional, revised, or derived from third-party inputs; the Actor preserves the series' source description and does not imply government endorsement.

Local development

npm install
npm test
apify run --input='{"minPercentChange":1,"maxResults":10}'