On 25-aug-2005, at 23:51, John Levine wrote:
and as people have noted, the US is unusual both in being large and spread out. Canada, for example, has a gargantuan area, but just about everyone lives in the 100 mile wide strip along the southern border and everyone else lives in a few cities like Calgary.
Not exactly. If you look at the US population density charts you see that the density goes down almost as a direct function of how far west you are. West of Dallas the country is pretty much empty. (There are a few high density pockets on the west coast, but even most of California is largely uninhabited.) The north-east is just as densely populated as countries such as Germany and Italy, the mid-west is similar to France and Spain. But what matters much more than the average number of people per square (insert your favorite unit of length measurement) per region/ province/state/country is how close people live together. If there are 400 people in a 3218x3218 meter area (hey, that's four square miles!) it makes a big difference whether they all sit in a big apartment building right in the middle, or they all have their own house in the middle of a 150x150m (500x500ft) property.