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What's the total population of people living in such dense cities vs elsewhere? According to older statistics I was able to find, it's 58% living in cities of
by white-flame 10y ago
What's the total population of people living in such dense cities vs elsewhere?
According to older statistics I was able to find, it's 58% living in cities of over 200k people in the USA, but that's way more inclusive of a measurement than what would reflect cities that are dense to the point where, for instance, walking becomes more desirable than car ownership.
For instance, the Phoenix metro area has over 5 million people, but it has no really "dense" areas in the walkable sense. It's sprawling desert that was able to be built up recently and spaciously.
In the USA, there's likely a couple dozen million people max living in the too-dense-for-cars cities, and there's hundreds of millions in the population at large. We have the most mobile population on the planet, thus we can "vote" where to live far easier, and the vast majority lives outside those areas. Sure, most are still urban and suburban, but certainly not living in NYC/SF style density.
- gozur88 10y ago>We have the most mobile population on the planet, thus we can "vote" where to live far easier, and the vast majority lives outside those areas. Well, sort of. Don't most people move to whereever their next job is? I would love to live somewhere like Montana or Idaho where population density is low, but I don't know how I'd pay the bills when I got there.
- clock_tower 10y agoMost people in the US don't live in walkable areas, but just how many walkable areas are there in the US? Look up New World Economics on really narrow streets and 19th-century hypertrophism: the answer might be as low as three or four. No wonder it's so expensive to live in them!
- skewart 10y agoWell, by this logic one could say that nobody wants interplanetary travel. I mean, heck, only a few people have ever been to outer space - the vast majority have spent their entire lives here on Earth - so, therefore nobody must be interested. You're forgetting that it's illegal to build dense walkable cities in much of the country. And, like others have pointed out, few people are actually free to move to exactly the kind of place where they would ideally like to live. Past and current behavior is not always a good indicator of underlying desires.
- coldtea 10y agoWith cities in the US (apart from a select few like NY, Chicago, New Orleans, etc) being what they are, I wouldn't put forward the US as any kind of model for urban planning or the desirability of cities in general.