this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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Just took a look at some population density maps, and I must say that the kind of density you have between Boston and Washington DC is approximately what most of Central Europe looks like. Other parts of USA are pretty sparsely populated.
Apart from the large cities, you could say that anywhere east of Dallas looks a lot like northern Scandinavia in terms of population density. Even Poland has a higher density than the gaps between major cities such as Phoenix and Denver. To me, it seems like nearly everyone lives in one of the big cities, and there's hardly anything in between them.
The worst part, from a transportation perspective, is that our low density rural areas in the US are often isolated homesteads. Fully scattered single family farms and ranches, miles from the next family. We don't have as much village centric rural areas as in Europe. So it makes delivering services (transportation, education, health care) to our rural population much harder.
Similar sort of scattering happens in northern Scandinavia too, but I guess it's to a lesser extent. Most people in the region prefer to live within a 1 h drive to the nearest town, even if they are scattered. Proper hospital services might not be within that radius, but at least you can do basic shopping without driving the whole day. If the town isn't conveniently between two cities, you can forget about trains, and maybe even busses too. Having a driving license is absolutely necessary, because providing public transport in remote areas just isn't cost effective. Same goes for various public services too.
That makes sense, yeah. It's probably the closest comparison.