Question of the day
2026-07-13
How many gas stations are there in the United States? Walk through your estimate.
Answer it out loud first — like you would in the room. Then check yourself:
Reveal the model answer
Model answer
Bottom-up by demand. ~330M people, ~230M licensed drivers; say ~250M cars. Each car fills up ~once/week → ~250M fill-ups/week → ~13B fill-ups/year. A station might serve ~500 fill-ups/day = ~180k/year. Stations ≈ 13B / 180k ≈ 72k. Actual US figure is roughly ~115-150k, so this is the right order of magnitude (under-estimate driven by assuming high throughput per station — many rural/low-volume stations pull the average down). Flag throughput-per-station as the key sensitivity.
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