Reply #28: still missin da point [View All]

[iverglas]

"But at nearly the same land size as Texas, NSW
only has 6 million people. Density is still way off."

Yuppers -- of you're talking AVERAGE density. Who would, and for what purpose?

Check your map again. About half of NSW has what we could pretty confidently call ZERO people per square mile. And more than half of what's left has fewer than 2/sq. mi. This actually doesn't help your case, it ruins it!

Of the 6 million people in NSW, over half live in Sydney (the 57th biggest city in the world). About 4 million, from various reports I see. Your map (like mine) doesn't get quite refined enough to show the urban phenomenon; everything over 10/sq. mi. gets lumped together. We can pretty confidently assume that Sydney has a lot more than 10 people per square mile. And then there's Newcastle (280,000) ... and Wollongong (230,000) ... and Gosford (255,000) ... . The population OVERWHELMINGLY lives in urban agglomerations. Cities. Places with high population densities. We really don't just tack on a great chunk of uninhabited territory to that and say "look! no density!"

(And btw, people really aren't "spread out" along that coastline, either. Just like 75% of Canadians might be "spread out" in a 100-mile-wide band along the US border, even if you don't count all the rest of the country ... but there aren't actually 23 million people all holding hands in a 5,000 mile long chain. Nearly 2/3 of Australians live in the 16 cities listed here, ranging from 2 just under 100,000 to 2 well over 3,000,000, by my quick tally: http://www.citypopulation.de/Australia-UC.html)

Canada's average population density would be even lower than Australia's, I imagine. (50% more people; at least 50% more land area?) And yet St. James Town in downtown Toronto -- a low-income, high-rise housing development that essentially occupies a big city block -- is home to 20,000 people and a few years ago was the most densely populated spot on the planet. Very high ratio of immigrants, too. And a drug and violence problem, worse in the past than more recently, I believe.

http://www.rbebout.com/queen/mtc/2pparl.htm
(That's a really fine site about the modern urban history of a Toronto neighbourhood, for anyone who's interested.)

In Cabbagetown's Census Tract 67, some 1,700 people live on a third of a square kilometre (half the tract; the rest, St James' Cemetery, houses many more dead). St James Town's Tract 65, just one quarter the size, houses more than 15,000. Its population density -- more than 73,000 souls per square kilometre -- is the highest anywhere in Canada.

That's 186,880 / sq. mi., I believe. Can Texas beat that?

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