Re:The Stroad
by jeffbee on Monday November 22, 2021 @09:53AM
(#29306874)
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.
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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.