> The US looks "speckled" because there is a lot of empty space, which does not have to be connected. So the others that are all-red have it actually worse. Asi

> The US looks "speckled" because there is a lot of empty space, which does not have to be connected. So the others that are all-red have it actually worse. Asia has a lot more people too, so yes, that leads to higher density - but that's hardly an advantage to have to deal with over a billion people instead of a few hundred millions. There is plenty of research around public transit indicating the opposite: higher density increases transit viability, because public transit requires high demand per kilometer in order to be financially viable. For example, to quote this [1] highly cited paper: "There are well documented empirical thresholds of density below which transit is unpractical for users and financially unsustainable for operators." Or even just the opening line of the introduction: "The counterpoint to the correlation between low-density sprawl and automobile dependence is that between high density and more transit use." Connecting through "nothingness" is not an advantage: it costs actual money to build transit even through "nothingness" — labor and materials are not free, and even what you term "nothingness" is typically owned by someone and land rights still need to be acquired — and no one wants to go there. It would be cheaper to build transit between Popular Point A and Popular Point B if the vast "nothingness" between them was removed altogether — aka, high density. > They still are just as distributed You're taking the "sparse population distribution" argument pretty far out of context. The point is that they're sparse, not the total landmass size. > I find the effort in many comments to point out how the US is "special" and "different" from all the rest of the world very weird. I would not find it as weird if it looked like a detached analysis, but it seems to be mostly emotional. Why? So strange. What's the big deal, what do you lose, if you come to the conclusion that it's of course true that all problems are local and none are completely the same, the variability and the base problems are not actually different? What's the big deal? Isn't it enough to look for "exceptionalism" in the achievements and possibilities, why does it have to also be true for such mundane stuff at any cost (e.g. suffering quality of arguments)? Thanks, but I think my posts in here have been pretty data-focused and detached. 1: http://courses.washington.edu/gmforum/Readings/Bertaud_Transit_US_Europe.pdf http://courses.washington.edu/gmforum/Readings/Bertaud_Trans...