EU and US States by Population Density

35 comments
  1. This is a fun visual to explain why moving from ‘Vermont’ to ‘The Netherlands’ was such a shock just in terms of how many people I see during a day.

  2. Americans will bring this up as an excuse for driving lots, even though they mostly live in metro areas just like the rest of us, only with more space between them in some cases.

  3. I always find it funny that people around the world imagine Russia as a wild and sparsely populated land, but the place most likely to be visited by foreigners is Moscow. And Moscow region would take the second place in this list when viewed separately, just like the US states here.

  4. It would also be interesting to look at the density of the permanent settlement area. Western Austria is extremely mountainous, with people concentrated in a few valleys that are extremely densely populated (over 500 inhabitants per km²). In Tyrol, less than 11% of the area is permanent settlement area, the rest is mountainous.

  5. The EU had no states. It’s a group of countries working together each with their own government

  6. The plot title is wrong as it says density per area, shouldn’t it either be population by unit area or just density?

  7. UK should be split up by country, since you know…

    Anyway, interesting data points OP. Makes me realize that the Northeast should invest in public transport.

  8. I come from one the high density countries, and last year I went on holiday to Estonia. The lack of people and buildings everywhere was sooo refreshing. Beautiful country, can’t wait to go back.

  9. The fact that France has less population density than Poland actually blew my mind. I know France is bigger but I didn’t expect it to be that much bigger

  10. This is actually misleading, because it assumes a standard distribution across each square mile.

    For instance, Illinois is dominated by a single city, Chicago. Chicago, which I will define as Cook, Will, Dupage, Lake, Kane, and Mchenry Counties for the purposes of the discussion, have a population of 8445866. (Per Wikipedia Illinois counties). They are 9508 sq km in size. Illinois is 57915 sq km in size, or about 10% smaller than England. Illinois has a population of 12,67 million. So roughly 2/3 of the entire population lives in 16% of the land, which isn’t entirely correct because the suburban counties aren’t entirely developed out.

  11. Make the UK just England then see the difference, Scotland makes up 1/3 of the UK land mass…only has 5m people…thats like half of London.

  12. Jersey’s combination of high population density with its status as a sort-of extended suburb of New York and its prioritization of cars/highway infrastructure makes for a really odd combination. I moved there as an eighteen-year-old from the UK and got along alright without a car, but even in the urban centers it still feels weirdly hostile to walking around and there were so many areas of the state I barely knew existed because their connections to transit were poor or solely focused on getting white collar workers into Manhattan.

  13. A slight twist I would love is to see density per reasonably inhabitable square mile.

    For example, people generally can’t live in most area covered by mountains, rivers, lakes, swamps, etc. This might swap this around quite a bit.

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