# U.S. Department of Transportation **Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/us-dot/ **Website:** https://www.transportation.gov/ **APIs profiled:** 12 The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) is the federal transportation regulator for the United States, the deepest travel market in the world. In aviation DOT is not a participant in the distribution chain — it is the counterweight to it: through the Office of the Secretary it writes and enforces 14 CFR Part 256 on electronic airline information systems (explicitly naming global distribution systems, corporate booking tools and internet flight search tools), Part 257 on code-share disclosure, Part 250 on oversales, Part 259 on enhanced passenger protections, Part 260 on fare and ancillary fee refunds, and 399.84 on full-fare advertising. Its Bureau of Transportation Statistics is the sole authoritative source for US airline economics — T-100 segment traffic, Form 41 financials, the Consumer Airfare Report city-pair fare tables, denied boardings and mishandled baggage — published as free Socrata SODA APIs. Its Federal Aviation Administration operates a Gravitee API portal at api.faa.gov whose public catalog is enumerable without login and serves genuinely open, unauthenticated OpenAPI 3.0.1 services for national airspace delay status and aeronautical chart product releases, alongside gated APIs for pilot records and safety reporting. Beyond aviation the operating administrations each run their own surface: NHTSA publishes anonymous vehicle, recall, complaint and safety-rating APIs; FRA publishes SOAP/WSDL rail safety services; FMCSA issues the department's only self-serve API key behind a Login.gov account. API posture, honestly: transportation.gov itself is bot-blocked (HTTP 403 to any non-browser client) and publishes no departmental OpenAPI, there is no OAuth, no idempotency key, no RFC 9457 errors, no Sunset headers and no security.txt anywhere — but the data surfaces underneath are open, unmetered, public domain and fully bulk-exportable. This is a provider with an excellent exit path and no commercial lock-in of any kind. ## Kin Score — 52.6 / 100 (developing) Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: flat (+0.0 from 52.6). | Facet | Score | |---|---| | Discoverability | 81.5 | | Contract Quality | 50.6 | | Governance | 16.7 | | Contract Governance | 16.7 | | Operational Transparency | 44.7 | | Developer Ergonomics | 58.9 | | Commercial Clarity | 34.2 | | Access Clarity | 34.2 | Regulatory layer — **Government & Public Sector**: 57.4 (matched via tags). ## Agent readiness — 38.7 (agent-ready) | Dimension | Value | |---|---| | Spec Presence | yes | | Agentic Access | derived | | Reversibility Documented | no | | MCP Server | no | | Auth Clarity | yes | | Idempotency | no | | Error Semantics | documented | | OpenAPI Examples | partial | | Rate Limit Signal | no | | Event Surface Described | yes | | Agent Skills | derived | | Well Known Catalog | no | | Consent Identity | no | | Agent Card | no | | Dry Run Mode | no | ## APIs (12) - **FAA Aeronautic Product Release API (APRA)** — FAA aeronautical chart and data publication download API. Thirty-four GET operations expose edition metadata and ZIP product downloads for the digital Terminal Procedures Public... - **FAA Air Carrier Pilot Records Database (PRD) API** — Data submission API for the FAA Pilot Records Database. Five paths covering pilot record create/update/delete, pilot data tracking, and asynchronous pilot data search request an... - **FAA Safety Assurance System (SAS) API** — Single-operation submission API for passenger discrepancy reporting into the FAA Safety Assurance System. Air carriers submit hazardous-material discrepancies discovered on pass... - **FAA Data Catalog (CKAN Action API v3)** — The Federal Aviation Administration's open data catalog, running CKAN 2.11.4 and exposing the full CKAN Action API v3 anonymously at /api/3/action/. package_list, package_search... - **DOT Data Hub Open Data API** — The departmental open data platform, served from both data.transportation.gov and datahub.transportation.gov on Socrata SODA 2.1. For travel and aviation this is where the DOT O... - **Bureau of Transportation Statistics Open Data API** — The Bureau of Transportation Statistics open data platform on Socrata SODA 2.1, and the authoritative record of US commercial aviation activity. Aviation holdings verified live ... - **NHTSA vPIC (Vehicle Product Information Catalog) API** — The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Vehicle Product Information Catalog and VIN decoder, and the most widely consumed API in the department. Decodes any US-mark... - **NHTSA Safety API (recalls, complaints, safety ratings)** — The NHTSA public safety API that powers the dynamic search applications on nhtsa.gov. Three families: /recalls for safety recalls by vehicle or campaign number, /complaints for ... - **FRA Safety Data Web Services** — The Federal Railroad Administration's rail safety web services, and the only SOAP surface in the department. Two WSDL 1.1 contracts were retrieved live and harvested verbatim on... - **FMCSA QCMobile API** — The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's carrier data API — real-time queries on motor carrier registration, authority and safety data, including all of the passenger c... - **USDOT ITS JPO Operational Data Environment (ODE) REST API** — The reference connected-vehicle data platform authored by the USDOT Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office. Eight operations over SAE J2735 messaging — Traveler... - **U.S. Department of Transportation Airport Status Web Service** — U.S. Department of Transportation Airport Status Web Service from U.S. Department of Transportation — 2 path(s) described in OpenAPI. ## MCP servers (1) - **U.S. Department of Transportation MCP Server** ## Agentic access (1) - **Us Dot Agentic Access** — 53 operations · 15 acting ## Security (3) - **Us Dot Authentication** — none/apiKey · 8 schemes - **Us Dot Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DNSSEC · DMARC - **Us Dot Vulnerability Disclosure** — Bugcrowd ## Tags Travel, United States, Aviation, Airlines, Airports, Government, Regulator, Distribution, Aviation Consumer Protection, Open Data, Transportation, Safety, Statistics, Automotive, Rail --- Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/us-dot/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.