Going the Distance with Trucking
We here at TopMark Funding love a good thought experiment. They are very helpful in understanding key facts about the trucking industry, especially if the reader is not a commercial driver, but still notable if he or she is.
Here is a question for you: how far does every trucker in the United States travel in a single day?
Assumptions
For our model we are going to need to do some assumptions:
- There are 897,370 Class 8 truck drivers in the United States working as of the time of publishing this article. The trucking industry at large (diesel mechanics, brokers, etc.) is much larger than that, but they do not do the driving.
- The drivers will average 55 miles per hour. This is to adjust for those driving on highways that allow 80 miles per hour as well as the time drivers spend driving on city streets.
- Each driver will work for eleven hours a day, meaning each trucker goes 605 miles each day.
Results and Comparisons
We multiply the number of truck drivers with the number of miles driven each day, and we find that it is 543,908,850 miles. For reference, here are some similar distances:
- 194,247 trips from coast to coast, Maine to California.
- 22,000 trips across the Earth’s equator.
- 23 round trips from the Earth to the Moon, which can fit the diameter of all eight planets in our solar system within it.
- One round trip to Mars and back, with a little extra to accommodate for the fact that this distance is constantly changing.
Conclusion
Hopefully our little thought experiment has given you an idea of just how much movement goes on in the United States’ trucking industry. Getting an accurate number would require us to have access to mileage data on every truck in the United States, but we hope that this model helps put into perspective just how massive in scope the distance 18-wheelers drive each day truly is.
If you are curious, the amount of miles driven by the trucking industry each year is roughly 198.6 billion miles. This is as far as the average distance from Earth to Saturn and back.
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