Forecasting inland waterway grain traffic

Short-term forecasting of inland waterway traffic has been a neglected area in water transportation forecasting. This paper presents a time series model to forecast Mississippi River Lock 27 grain tonnage for the 1989:1 - 1999:4 period. The model was selected on the basis of several measures of goodness of fit and out-of sample forecasting performance. The out-of-sample forecasting performance of the model was good, as the percentage difference between the year 2000 actual and forecasted tonnage was less than 5.5% for three of the four quarters and only 2.3% for the year. Apparently, the forecast errors in the quarterly forecasts tend to offset each other so that the annual forecast is relatively close to the actual annual traffic. These forecasts could be used by inland waterway shippers to evaluate transportation equipment needs and establish marketing plans, government policymakers to measure the effects of past and prospective transportation policies, port authorities to monitor port utilization and inland waterway carriers to develop business plans and hire operating staff.