Introduction
The Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) Border Crossing Data provide summary statistics for inbound crossings at the U.S.-Canada and the U.S.-Mexico border at the port level. Data are available for trucks, trains, containers, buses, personal vehicles, passengers, and pedestrians. Border crossing data are collected at ports of entry by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The data reflect the number of vehicles, containers, passengers or pedestrians entering the United States. CBP does not collect comparable data on outbound crossings. Users seeking data on outbound counts may therefore want to review data from individual bridge operators, border state governments, or the Mexican and Canadian governments. Source data can be foundhere.
1.1 The purpose of this document is to perform an analysis on the amount and type of inbound border crossings into the United States and if such values have been affected by the recent pandemic.
1.2 The US Department of Transportaton data includes dates of ingress into the country by locations and amounts from 1996 to Sept 1, 2020. The data used is stored in tabular form where each observation represents a specific entry type into the USA.
1.3 This report will assist the individual to better understand how the pandemic has affected international tourism and trade with the USA.
Packages Required
| Package | Purpose |
|---|---|
| tidyverse | { Core packages for data analysis and manipulation |
| lubridate | { For parsing date-time data |
| knitr | { General-purpose literate program engine for output control |
| readr | { For importing cSV data rectangular data |
| scales | { For transforming and rescaling data |
| stats | { For creating interactive tables |
| skimr | { For general summary statistics about data set |
| prettydoc | { Creating documents in R Markdown |
| car | { Companion to applied regression analysis |
| ggcharts | { Creating common chart type visualizations |
| DT | { Rendering of HTML tables |
| gridExtra | { Provides miscellaneous functions for grids |
| ggmap | { for geocoding and mapping |
| sf | { for transorming locations tibble into an sf object |
| kableExtra | { for table placement in html |
Data Preparation
Data cleaning tasks were performed
- Date variable format was changed from character to date.
- Variables names of Port Code and Port Name were hyphenated.
- Port_Code variable was changed from character to factor.
Variable Explanations
| Variables Used | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Port_Name | Name of Port entry point |
| State | State of Entry |
| Port_Code | Code for Specific Port |
| Border | Name of Border |
| Date | Date of border crossing |
| Measure | Mode of transportation |
| Value | Value |
Data Analysis and Visualizations
Overall Border crossings over time
We see that crossings into the US are significantly down in 2020, relative to all previous years.
### Border Crossings stratisfied by Mode
Traffic is down significantly in all modes of transport into the USA. However, tranportation by truck methods were less affected by the pandemic than all others.
How much traffic into the country is each State receiving?
| State | Count |
|---|---|
| TX | 703523241 |
| CA | 598142554 |
| AZ | 186596358 |
| NY | 150404782 |
| MI | 125150234 |
| WA | 113358010 |
| ME | 32611375 |
| VT | 22592392 |
| NM | 20424173 |
| MN | 19452338 |
| ND | 17000161 |
| MT | 11380390 |
| ID | 4822961 |
| AK | 3630655 |
| OH | 607 |
Texas leads the way with the most border crossings since 2005 to present. But we need to take a closer look of this trend on an annual level.
Excluding Texas, how have border crossings been affected since 20015?
