Agricultural products are the single largest user of freight services, and according to a joint study by the USDA and the Department of Transportation, 80 percent of all domestic ag commodities travel on 17 percent of the U.S. highway mileage.
Agriculture Marketing Service’s Adam Sparger discusses some of the focal points of the study.
“We looked at all the recently completed freight plans and this was a new requirement for the U.S. Department of Transportation,” Sparger states. “Looking at their current planned expenditures on highway improvements over the next several years, we found that the benefits exceed costs by factor of two or more, which is a no-brainer in terms of making an investment decision.”
He also says that if you were to increase the amount of expenditure, and if states were to increase their expenditures by a factor of four, the benefit cost ratio does not change.
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