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Comment by dagw | Hacker News Reader

I love how I can just jump on a bike here and be at a large supermarket in 5 minutes

And even when the supermarket/mall is close by in the US, you still can't necessarily walk/bike there. I was visiting a friend who lived in the Midwest and his house was less than a mile from the mall. I asked him how to walk over there, and he admitted he'd never tried. So I set out to try, and the only way I found was by running across a busy 4 lane street without any crossings.

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America is _very_ big. Bigger than Europe even. That means that there are lots of different development patterns all across the country. While it is true that most places are car dependent, there are also cities where the majority of people who live there don't even own a car. I lived in Boston/Cambridge Massachusetts for 10 years and New York for 8, and I have never owned a car (or bike). Walking and taking the subway/metro are the most convenient modes of travel in those cities, and you get all the benefits of vibrance that comes with that. For the past 18 years, I've had about 2-3 big grocery stores and too many smaller shops and fruit stands to count within a 10 minute walking radius. The same goes for bars, restaurants, book stores, coffee shops, music/dancing venues, etc. All without even needing to get on the subway.

The "low density" of the US is deceptive. It's true that there are vast expanses of desert, and even that New York has a forest in it the size of the Netherlands, but when you compare the density of individual US states to European countries, you see it is no excuse for us not building broadband infrastructure and otherwise being sensible about things.

California, in particular, has a population density of about 100 people per square kilometer which is about the same as France. Most of California is either uninhabitable, factory farms, or military reservations. The population is highly concentrated near the coast.

People who haven't been there imagine that Los Angeles is "sprawl" but the truth it is very high density that is "sprawling" over a large plain that is boxed in by mountains. Millions of people have a line of sight to the Hollywood sign.

(I grew up in Southern New Hampshire which is based on Buckminister Fuller's diabolical geometry of airports and subdvisions -- where getting from one subdivision to the next is like going from the right side of your left lung to the right side of your left lung all the way up to the fork in your trachea. That is a self-inflicted wound that has nothing to do with how dense the population is.)

The population-weighed density - the density experienced by the typical American - is also much higher than you’d think. For example California is expansive and empty-seeming on paper, but half of the state lives in L.A. Population-weighting makes more sense than dividing the gross population by the gross area.

I've wondered for a while how you would do that.

One approach is scale-dependent (divide the area into a grid of square kilometers, sort by population, pick the square kilometer where the median person lives.) but you would get different answers if you picked different scales.

The median of "How far away is your nearest neighbor?" seems parameter free at first but it is absurd if you live in an apartment. (e.g. ignores all the space around your apartment.) I guess you could look for the median (or other decile) of "What is radius in which N people live?" where N might be 100-10,000 but then you're back to having a spectrum instead of a single number again.

Maybe you can't avoid that.

There's a bunch of literature on this if you start with a search for population-weighted density. There isn't one true way to do it, and scale matters greatly.

My comment about how big America was had nothing to do with density. I only mentioned the size of the country to highlight that there are a lot of different jurisdictions with lots of different development patterns.

Boston/Cambridge and NYC were initially built during colonial times, before cars and railroads, so were originally built for navigation by foot or horse.

You're right that there are places like that in the US, but we haven't been building like that for nearly 100 years at this point. Those places are historical curiosities, and not at all representative of the United States.

And before anyone says I should just live in places that are like that, It's not so easy to just pick up my life and move somewhere else.

The US may be big, but the majority of people live in the same small set of metropolitan areas.

That's true but it's also true that the transportation to parts of Boston sucks and outside of it it quickly becomes impossible to get around without a car.

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