This incredible quantity of goods - along with much of what is produced domestically - is handled by the country's 1.8 million truckers, which represents the 14th most common occupation nationally.

To see how these truckers are distributed across the nation, Visual Captalist's Marcus Lu has visualized data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to create two separate heat maps.

Key Findings from the Data

The relative density of each state's truckers is measured by their location quotient.

This represents the ratio of truckers in a state compared to the national average (both as a % of total employment). For example, if truckers made up 10% of a state's employment, and the national average was 2%, the location quotient for that state would be 5.