The purpose of this assignment is to provide you with a sense of transportation magnitudes, and to give you the opportunity to think quantitatively about some current issues in transportation. It involves simple calculations. These should not cause you any problems. However, it is important you think about the implications of the answers you get. As a transportation professional, it is important that you have a sense of these magnitudes, so that you will recognize when things that you read or hear deserve closer inspection.
Conventional wisdom is often a simplification, or just plain wrong.
At a more technical level, with increasing use of computer analysis in all aspects of engineering, you should be able to detect when results are suspicious. For a perfect score, you must at least answer the questions as stated, and the work must be neatly done. During the 1920s and 30s, a flat fare of 5 cents was common in urban transit systems. The total cost of operating a car was 8.1 cents per mile in 1950 and 40 cents in 1993. In 1995, some 3,384 billion ton miles were moved intercity.