Total population / total land area is an irrelevant statistic for country comparison. By population-weighted density the United States isn't significantly less

Total population / total land area is an irrelevant statistic for country comparison. By population-weighted density the United States isn't significantly less dense than Western Europe. Unfortunately, directly comparable, prepared numbers are difficult to come by. The 3 most memorable sources I've found are: * https://theconversation.com/think-your-country-is-crowded-these-maps-reveal-the-truth-about-population-density-across-europe-90345 https://theconversation.com/think-your-country-is-crowded-th... - Discusses (introduces?) the concept of "lived density" and provides graphs for Europe. I'm not sure how well the author was familiar with related work regarding population-weight density, which seems to be the more correct term. * https://ssrn.com/abstract=3119965 https://ssrn.com/abstract=3119965 - A low-level analytical discussion regarding population-weighted density as a metric. * https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.01167 https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.01167 - A COVID-19 pandemic-related paper which incidentally includes comparable population-weighted density metrics for both Western Europe and the United States. I haven't looked into things since 2018 (excepting taking note of the 2020 COVID-19 paper), but IIRC census.gov has some population-weighted density numbers somewhere based on MSA and census block (tract?) proximity. It's not easily comparable to available European statistics, but it might be a good place to start if you want to play around with U.S. density numbers. Maybe there have been better resources published since the above.