August 21st, 2020 
Reply to following 3 discussion separately on(what you have learned in this class, how will you apply this class to your daily life and degree, and how would you improve this class.)responses of 100 or more words. Responses should be a minimum of 100 words and include direct questions.
1. All the different lessons cover in the class are key elements for todays transportation and logistics services. I learn many different new things in each lesson of the class. The demand elasticity was a very interesting area cover in the class, price changes play a major role in the success or failures of different types of goods and services. Another lesson was the cost in transportation, where many different factors can affect the overall cost of operations for a business and its consumers. My forum was based on the aviation industry, where I presented how delays were driving the cost of operations up. Many of the responses from classmates highlighted the fact that consumers are paying the price for this type of delays more than the airlines. The Geographic Information Systems (GIS) was something new for me, the system offers many different essential features for the development of projects. During this research I found that this type of system was used by pipelines, which its a great tool for the periodic inspections or inspections after natural events (ex. earthquakes, storms, etc. of areas that contain pipelines. Furthermore, the system is also utilized by the air traffic control (ATC) management system for development of new routes and flight paths. For example: airspace modeling applications combined with geographic information from the surrounding communities, such as land use, building heights and modified terrain, which helps to develop a safer path for flights. I plan to apply all the new knowledge obtain from this class in my daily life, current job, upcoming courses and future job (after the military).
2. Part 1:
Some of what I found to be the most noteworthy topics over the last 8 weeks has been; what factors influence the use of transportation, transportation demand, the different costs associated with transportation (agency, user and community), the environmental impacts of transportation and the impact of GIS within the transportation sector. Within my degree, I have already used some of these topics to formulate discussions within another class (GIS). I would love to be able to utilize GIS within my career field, but due to budgetary constraints and security issues, it is not something I can simply just do, and I do not see it being utilized within the near future. In my current job, I can look at the different user costs of transportation in order to look for more efficient methods. This class has also opened my eyes to the fact that every individual involved in the transportation line have associated costs, many of which I did not think of.
My two recommendations for this class would be under the week 8 assignment tab, state the we need to get approval for our topic within the instructions, and sometimes I do not see the correlation between questions in the forums such as this weeks.
Part 2:
I chose prediction number 7: Inflation will mostly not be a problem in the U.S. We expect core inflation to remain around 1.5%. I would say this is mostly accurate, since the average rate of inflation since 2010 has been 1.63% per year (Webster). However, that puts us cumulatively around 17.58% higher than in 2010. This is means that the actual value of the U.S. dollar has gone down. In fact, the buying power of a dollar has gone down 9 of the last 10 years. The sectors that saw the most inflation were housing and medical, which is not all that surprising. Inflation within the transportation sector was a bit of a roller coaster. It had an average of 0.51% inflation rate over the last 10 years. It declined from 2010 (9.8%) until 2014 (-7.81%), increased through 2017 (4.51%) and has decreased since then (2019 at 3.17%).
3. Part One: Reflection
Over the past eight weeks, I have gained a greater understanding of the economic element of transportation. It is one thing to comprehend economics and how it affects nations throughout the world, and another to understand the economics of a specific industry. This course helped to visualize the numbers that are important to the transportation industry, along with the methods to compute those numbers into meaningful data successfully. Math is certainly not my strong point, and working equations are challenging to remember; however, most of the math included in this course was straightforward, with only a few examples that I was unable to comprehend. At this point in time, this knowledge does not transfer into my current position, but in the future, an opportunity may arise. I do not have any recommendations on how this class could be improved. Excellent information regarding transportation economics.
Part Two: Predictions
Prediction number one stated that the U.S. recovery would start slowly, except that there was no mention of whether it would continue to progress slowly or skyrocket at a certain point. In that case, the prediction was accurate due to the recovery starting slowly and remain a slow recovery for several years to come. Fair (2018) suggests several reasons for the slowness in recovery. Among the reasons two stand out more so than others, first is productivity, which is also associated with a decline in the labor force. The next reason is the sluggish fiscal policy of the U.S. (p. 2). The author comes to the conclusion that all facets of the study did grow as expected over the time period evaluated, even if it was not as fast as many predicted (p. 20).
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