News 20 Feb 2020

Compilation of transport statistics centralised to Statistics Finland

During 2020, Statistics Finland will start publishing several official transport statistics previously published by Traficom, the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency. The compilation of official transport statistics is centralised to Statistics Finland based on a decision by Traficom, the Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency and Statistics Finland.

“It is more straightforward for users of statistics to find extensive statistical data concerning transport in one web service. The centralisation also harmonises and increases the efficiency of the production of statistics and opens up new possibilities to develop transport statistics in collaboration with other operators in the field of transport”, says Hannele Orjala, Director of Information Services at Statistics Finland, who participated in the project steering.

The official statistics transferred from Traficom to Statistics Finland are the merchant fleet statistics, statistics on domestic waterborne traffic, statistics on foreign shipping traffic, as well as Finnish railway statistics and Finnish road statistics. In future, the data of the statistics on canal traffic will be published as part of both the statistics on foreign shipping traffic and the statistics on domestic waterborne traffic. Air transport statistics will begin to be published as a new set of regular transport statistics.

“The centralisation of official transport statistics to one place serves users of statistics. However, after the transfer of official statistics we at Traficom will continue to produce extensive sets of statistics based on our own registers, so in future, we will still work in close cooperation also in this respect”, says Director Pietari Pentinsaari from Traficom.

Transport statistics information service transfers to Statistics Finland

Statistics Finland publishes annual data on the transferred statistics starting from the statistical reference year 2019 and monthly data starting from the statistical reference year 2020. All statistical data in the field of transport will be published as statistical releases on Statistics Finland’s web pages and as database tables in the Statfin database service. The publication dates of statistics can be found in the release calendar.

“The statistical tables of these statistics will, in future, be available in Statistics Finland’s Statfin database, which enables more versatile use of the data. Desired selections can be made from the tables, the table data can be converted into a graph or the data can be exported to an external application. The data can also be used through the interface”, says Statistics Finland’s Senior Statistician Matti Kokkonen, product owner of the development project.

In future, Statistics Finland is responsible for the information service related to official transport statistics and for international data deliveries. Responsibility for the road traffic performance calculation, which has been produced for the Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency as a statistical service and the review services for road traffic accident data are transferred to Statistics Finland. Traficom will continue publishing statistics based on their own registers. Traficom’s statistical database is also still available.

Of the transferred statistics, data on the merchant fleet statistics is the first to be published on Statistics Finland’s web pages on 20 February 2020.

Further information:
Director, Information Services Hannele Orjala, Statistics Finland, tel. +358 29 551 3582
Director Pietari Pentinsaari, the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency Traficom, tel. +358 29 534 5233
Senior Statistician Matti Kokkonen, Statistics Finland, tel. +358 29 551 3770