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Comment by krzyk | Hacker News Reader

Strange, that they call it densely populated, it's quite average for a European country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_and_population_of_Europea...

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On the list you linked Netherlands is ranked 8th out of 54 countries. I wouldn't call that "average". Besides, the first seven countries on that list are small. Four are microstates and the other three are British dependencies.

I'd say, for it's size, Netherlands is densely populated.

Yes, you are right. Sorry I once again mistaken Dutch people as the ones living in Denmark. Now it makes much more sense, once again sorry for confusion.

It's actually a bit different than what you'd get from that table. NL (like most countries) has varying population density. What's not obvious is that NL has a crazy distribution where we have a large chunk (the 'Randstad') that contains a very large portion of the population and a relatively much larger area that is just about empty.

So depending on where you are you can travel for 150 Km and never leave the built-up areas or you can travel for 150 Km and you'll see nothing but grass, cows, the occasional farm and the highway you're on (A6/A7).

Unfortunately the distribution is not optimal for economic reasons. I live in a village (Zoetermeer) (123 000 people) with an density of 9000 people per square mile. Is not uncommon for these densities in the Randstad, where the avarage density over this area is around 4000 per square mile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randstad

I'm not sure you're reading that right. Everything with a higher population density is a city state or a tiny island nation. Excluding those, it's the country with the highest population density in Europe, with a population density almost four times that of Europe (except Russia, Azerbaijan and Georgia) itself.

The Netherlands is most certainly not quite average as far as population density goes.

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