Waterborne Commerce Statistics

Waterborne commerce statistics are the statutory US record of cargo and vessel trips moving on coastal, Great Lakes and inland waterways, collected by the USACE WCSC and released as TOWS/WCUS manuscripts, WTLUS vessel files and the Principal Ports feature service.

In this catalog it appears concretely: - USACE WCSC publishes — "TOWS vessel trip and cargo files". - WCSC ports are — "summarized as total, domestic, foreign, import and export short tons". - National totals roll up under — "waterway code 9950".

A label on a listing is not a deliverable. Teams that license on the strength of a product-name match routinely find the shipped files cover a narrower slice than they assumed, and backfilling history afterwards costs more than the license ever did.

The failure mode is concrete: the label appears in a listing, the delivered files tell a different story, and the gap surfaces mid-project when fixing it is most expensive.

You rarely have to take a vendor's word for it. 82.4% of the 1,744 datasets Datadory catalogs are free to access, and USACE WCSC publishes lets you inspect the real artifact before any budget is committed.

Treat every claim of this attribute as testable:

1. Open USACE WCSC publishes and confirm its record — "TOWS vessel trip and cargo files" — against the files you actually receive.
2. Open WCSC ports are and confirm its record — "summarized as total, domestic, foreign, import and export short tons" — against the files you actually receive.
3. Open National totals roll up under and confirm its record — "waterway code 9950" — against the files you actually receive.

See the term applied to real records: marine-ports-services data, marine-transportation data.

Adjacent concepts worth reading next: - ferry census - Port Freight Statistics