As a commodity, transportation has a supply side and a demand side. Unlike many other commodities, however, transportation's supply and demand overlap extensively. A significant portion of transportation is provided by consumers for their own use. Therefore, transportation means not only transportation industries, those businesses whose primary activity is to provide transportation services for a fee, but also it includes the transportation activities of other business establishments and consumers. Further, transportation can indicate transportation equipment, infrastructure, and other transportation-related goods and services. Differing concepts of transportation make it difficult to produce a single measure of the size of transportation in the economy that is satisfactory to all people for all purposes. Many widely used statistics of the size or importance of transportation in the economy do not correlate with the concepts they are intended to measure. This paper presents four measures of transportation's economic importance, namely, transportation industry's gross domestic product (GDP), transportation final demand, transportation-related GDP, and transportation-driven GDP. All four of these measures are conceptually consistent with the framework and accounting rules of the Systems of National Accounts and are statistically comparable to the GDP. With each targeted at a different aspect of transportation, together the four measures provide a complete frame of reference for the size and importance of transportation in the U.S. economy.
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