Which U.S. metro markets pull the most freight, run thinnest on public truck parking, and carry the least flood constraint on buildable land - ranked, with every step of the selection visible. This is the screen that comes before a site report: it shows how a candidate market earns attention in the first place.
Data vintage - loading.
Every named freight node in the country - seaports, ports, rail yards, intermodal terminals, and bulk/pipeline terminals (BTS NTAD). These are the fixed points that pull trucks toward a market.
Establishment growth in warehousing and trucking from 2018 to 2023 (Census County Business Patterns, NAICS 493 and 484), by county. Darker counties added the most warehousing and trucking establishments over that window. Counties without a CBP record for those industries carry zero growth. Long-run tonnage growth to 2050 (FHWA/ORNL FAF5) is a second growth layer, pending.
Public truck parking (FHWA/BTS Jason's Law; circle size = truck spaces) against the freight terminals that generate the traffic. This is the only national supply layer in hand: private truck stops and industrial-outdoor-storage yards are not counted, which overstates the gap in truck-stop-rich markets - a stated limitation.
Carrier power units divided by public truck-parking spaces, by county. Darker counties run more trucks per public space - thinner supply relative to demand.
Available land is buildable land, not an empty floodplain. County flood risk (FEMA National Risk Index, the higher of inland and coastal flood risk). Counties shaded darker carry flood risk into site selection - not disqualified, flagged.
The chain resolved: markets ranked by demand, supply gap, and land constraint. Pins carry the rank; markets flagged for high flood risk carry a distinct ring. Select a row for the member counties, raw numbers, source vintages, and any iVerify site reports already inside the market.
The sliders re-rank the table and the pins live from each market's stored component scores; they do not change the published formula. The Methodology below always states the published version 2 weights.
| # | Market | State(s) | D | G | S | L | Composite | Flags |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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The market unit is the CBSA (metro/micro statistical area), aggregated from member counties. Each component is normalized across ranked markets to 0-100 by min-max on a log scale for heavy-tailed counts: N(x) = 100*(x - min) / (max - min).
Sources and vintages (read from the load record, not hand-typed):
| Component | Source | Vintage | Rows |
|---|---|---|---|
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What this screen does not know. It does not count private truck stops or industrial-outdoor-storage yards, so the supply gap is overstated where those are dense. It carries no rates or occupancy and no parcel-level feasibility - buildable-land, rate, and site questions live downstream in the corridor and site reports. The 2018 to 2023 growth window straddles the COVID warehousing build-up and its cool-down, so growth reads high for markets that expanded fastest in that window. The flood flag uses an exposure-weighted risk score, which separates large metros weakly; a rate-based flood measure is planned. The ranking carries no cost signal at the market level; cost enters at the location screen below, where parcel data is covered. The weights are version 2 and are printed above verbatim. Announced projects, where present, appear as a per-market badge with a source link and are never scored.