As promised, the Curmudgeonly Professor is embarking on his campaign to provide at least one new bit of trivia, an informative information tidbit, or some unrelated nonsense on a daily, more or less, basis. To start with, consider these data on how goods move in the US, based on data from the U.S. Transportation Forecast to 2020 as reported in USA Today in its April 3-5 issue, p. 1:
- Truck 69%
- Rail 15%
- Pipeline 10%
- Water 6%
- Air <1%
There you have it. When the conversation gets boring, rise to the occasion and recite these data. The Curmudgeonly Professor actually taught transportation economics for many years, a field that got much less complicated and much less interesting when freight rates and air fares became deregulated. Remember, we have approximately 364 more such tidbits during the coming year, and there will be a final exam to see how many of them you remember.
