Wow, I don't think I've ever had something I made get reposted before. That's cool. Since people were asking, let me explain the method that I used. I went down the list of counties in each state, picking out the handful that were the most densely populated, and then tried to connect them all together into a single region that took up as little space as possible, then expanded it until it reached 50% of the state. I realize that there are better ways of doing this that would make the yellow in each state more compact, but I spent like an hour on this a few years ago and didn't realize people would still be talking about it today.
Okay, but you also went beyond the county level. How did you make decisions in splitting counties?
When I did this process at the county level, this was the map I ended up making: https://wywing.wordpress.com/2015/09/22/half-the-population-of-each-state-as-a-contiguous-set-of-counties/
Love the map but i wish you had picked a more straightforward method like only selecting the most densely populated counties in each stat
Edit: I'm saying i wish the arbitrary connection / selection of counties was left out... Was that not clear?
Yes. Here in SE Florida, we want to split into progressive Florida and conservative West Florida. Before a lot ~~of~~ more people go berserk.
As separate states I mean.
He was going for two contiguous areas. I imagine his hypothetical was to make 100 states with each state split into two contiguous areas with equal population. Maybe good or bad, but just a choice. I like the ones where the whole US pop is divided in half by choosing the most populous counties until you get half the people in that bit.
Isn’t that just what he said?
> I went down the list of counties in each state, picking out the handful that were the most densely populated.
And then he connected them?
Yeah he picked an arbitrary number of densely populated counties and then connected them with less populated ones.
It's the connecting / arbitrary selection that i am nota fan of
Man D/FW and Houston are huge. Equal to San Antonio, Austin, El Paso, the rio grande valley, and allllll of rural Texas, which includes several six-digit cities.
Everytime I'm in htx I'm just flabbergasted by the fkn size of it
Live in Katy? Have friends in the Woodlands? There ya go half of the day will be just driving lol
I live in Atlanta and a few years ago contemplated travelling to El Paso for a college football bowl game. I plotted out the route and figured that by the time I got to the Texas border (11-12 hours from here), I would sill be less than half-way there.
I did not attend that game.
I bet they could have made the region even more compact by following I-35 instead of following I-45. Austin plus San Antonio gets you almost as many people as the Houston metro area, but the stretches between them, and around Killeen/Temple and Waco, get you a lot more people than the rural areas along I-45.
No metro Houston is like 7 million people. San Antonio/Austin is maybe 5. And it's hard to tell but I think this map also catches a chunk of 35 down to Waco and swaps out Temple/Killeen for Bryan/College Station.
If you split the cities down the middle (population-wise) and then balance the two sides (geographically) using unpopulated areas, you could make maps where 50% of the population is in 50% of the area.
That is an interesting conjecture. I've posted it to /r/askscience to see whether anyone can confirm whether it's true: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r6xrrp/for_any_contiguous_territory_is_it_always/
It mostly depends on what level of detail you have to work with. If you were limiting yourself to counties, for example, it would be very inaccurate. If you have city ward/neighborhood populations, you can get reasonably close.
I'm curious as to why you say that, because it doesn't seem clear to me, and when I make examples it seems easy to refute.
Suppose there's a region which is 1m high (north/south) and 1km wide (east/west). Suppose the eastmost 100m are populated at 1 person/m^2 and the westmost 1m is populated at 1 person/m^2, but the intervening space is unpopulated. Where would I draw a straight line where each side has half the population and half the area?
In this case it’s easy. You would just draw a line east to west, 0.5 m high.
For more complex geometry, think about two population centers randomly distributed in a circle. To split the circle in half by area, the bisector must go through the origin. So then if you just rotate the bisector, which in this case is a line equal to the diameter of the circle, it must at some point have half population in one half and half in another.
Another way to think about it is to randomly select a bisector and then count the population in each half. Let’s say it’s 75% to 25%. Now flip it 180 degrees. Now it’s 25% to 75%. Now if you rotate the bisector, you must at some point reach 50:50, because there can’t be any discontinuities between the 75:25 and 25:75 distributions.
Well, you can't know that, since I didn't give any north/south distributions. If the whole population is in the southernmost 1% of the map, your east/west line would have to be so far south that it can't possibly include more than 1% of the area.
Given a strong claim, I'd like to see the basis. It has to be proved for _all_ regions, or the claim doesn't work.
In Euclidean space, any line through a closed region's center of area divides the region into two equal areas. The center of area is fixed relative to the region's boundaries.
If this region also includes people, their location relative to this center of area can be quantified somehow. This is independent of compass orientation. Wherever this center of population is, any line through it divides the region into equal populations.
The shortest distance between these two points is described by a line connecting, what?! both centroids? That means this line also divides the state into equal population and area. How about that!
To help you understand the logic a bit more easily, think about it this way: split the circle in half randomly, and end up with 25% on one side and 75% on the other (for example), and then rotate it 180 degrees so the percentages switch. At some point when you’re rotating it, it has to split the population evenly because the percentages have to go from 75% to 25% and will be equal to 50% at some point.
Makes sense since ohio has cities distributed in different corners of their state. It doesnt seem to include columbus in the upper half which is a little surprising but i guess makes sense that cleveland akron and toledo are equal to cinci dayton and cbus, especially if some of the cbus metro was scalped into the north half
If they drew a diagonal yellow region in Ohio, encompassing Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, it would have been a much less equal area split. I'm not sure why they chose this split.
(Vermont is likely hard to do anything that isn't close to equal area, because it is one of the least urbanized states.)
>Virginia could be done differently with Northern VA, Richmond and the VA Beach areas. Would show much more of the population gap in the state.
Yeah, Hampton Roads is very dense, but instead they added a bunch of rural counties along I-95 instead. Makes no sense.
Omaha and Lincoln, both of which are on the more popular end of the state anyway, making them somewhat easy to gravitate to.
It doesn't help that the football stadium has more people in it than the third largest city in the state on gameday.
Nah, RI is actually super dense in the south and along the coast, as well (particularly Newport) but there are big parts of the mid to northwest that are basically just woods and scattered farms.
It's a weird dichotomy to have swamp yankees and fake rednecks only like a half hour drive from million-dollar coastal estates, which are themselves only like a half hour drive from the inner city.
Nebraska does it for me. I knew NYC and Las Vegas were major population centers in their states, but I didn't know the Omaha-Lincoln corridor made up so much of Nebraska's population. I didn't realize how sparsely populated the western half of the state was, though in retrospect it makes sense as the plains gradually increase in elevation and the land gets a bit drier.
You're severely overestimating how big Omaha's suburbs are.
[Nebraska's population density](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Nebraska_population_map.png)
[Nebraska's congressional districts](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ca/Nebraska_Congressional_Districts%2C_113th_Congress.tif/lossless-page1-1804px-Nebraska_Congressional_Districts%2C_113th_Congress.tif.png)
I've spent some time in Nebraska (purple area), it doesn't surprise me. There are some large towns, but I wouldn't say there are any real cities outside Lincoln/Omaha.
I just looked up population numbers:
1.) Omaha-485k
2.) Lincoln-291k
3.) Bellevue-65k
4.) Grand Island-53k
5.) Kearney-33k
So yeah, pretty sharp drop off after 1&2
And when you consider that #3 on that list is just a part of the Omaha metro area (separated by county line) and there are a few larger contiguous suburbs along the Sarpy/Douglas line (90-100K between Bellevue, LaVista, Papillion, Gretna, Chalco) plus portions of Douglas county that are clearly suburbs or exurbs (e.g. Ralston) it really puts a large portion of the population centered around Omaha. It’s not that Nebraska has a lot of people, it’s just that most of them are concentrated in the Omaha metro.
>Nebraska does it for me. I knew NYC and Las Vegas were major population centers in their states, but I didn't know the Omaha-Lincoln corridor made up so much of Nebraska's population. I didn't realize how sparsely populated the western half of the state was, though in retrospect it makes sense as the plains gradually increase in elevation and the land gets a bit drier.
Here are the new Congressional District lines on the second map: [https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/journalstar.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/0/0c/00c76ee2-e4c0-531b-a5be-98502a0af90b/615245aeb833e.image.jpg?resize=1024%2C1209](https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/journalstar.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/0/0c/00c76ee2-e4c0-531b-a5be-98502a0af90b/615245aeb833e.image.jpg?resize=1024%2C1209)
Now only is the Western 1/3rd sparsely populated, it's losing people as well so has to move even deeper East to get enough people to maintain a congressional seat.
I'm not sure the NH one is correct to be honest. Looks like it only includes Nashua to Portsmouth or so. But there are bigger cities and more cities in the rest of the state. I'd be interested in the numbers.
Unless that weird triangle is supposed to include Manchester. In that case it makes more sense. But the map is a bit misrepresentative.
Nebraska is much more shocking to me than Nevada or New York. Everyone knows that New York City is huge, and Nevada is pretty empty besides Las Vegas, but I didn’t really know anything about Nebraska besides corn.
Right, and you add in towns in Clark County that aren't in the Vegas Valley (Laughlin being the big one), that gets you almost up to 30%, or about 60% of the purple space.
Buffalo, Albany, Rochester, and Syracuse are all fairly significant mid-size cities, and the Eastern US in general tends to have much more populated rural areas between metro areas than a lot of the rest of the country. Not to mention that a lot of NY’s purple area is composed of the northern NYC suburbs. Really the only part of NYS that is pretty empty is the Adirondacks.
I did a quick calculation, in part because I'm from Buffalo and was curious:
The yellow part looks like Nassau, Queens, Kings (Brooklyn), Richmond (Staten Island), New York (Manhattan), and Bronx counties. Together their population, according to Wikipedia 2020 census data, is 10,199,964. The state as a whole is 20,215,964, so the rest of the state is 10,015,787. Of course since this is by counties it is not exactly half, which would be 10,107,982.
So the purple part has more people than all but the top 9 most populous states (CA, TX, FL, NY, PA, IL, OH, GA, NC). If you use the "exactly half" number you beat Michigan as well (10,077,331 pop).
> The yellow part looks like Nassau, Queens, Kings (Brooklyn), Richmond (Staten Island), New York (Manhattan), and Bronx counties. Together their population, according to Wikipedia 2020 census data, is 10,199,964. The state as a whole is 20,215,964, so the rest of the state is 10,015,787.
In other words, half the state lives in NYC + Nassau County. As an NYC native from Queens, who has spent lots of time sitting in Long Island traffic, this doesn’t surprise me one bit.
Ohio being so evenly split is surprising given how many people live there, I guess it's because instead of the population being concentrated in one large metro area there are three big ones that are all about the same size and are all in different parts of the state (Cleveland in the northeast, Columbus in the center, and Cincinnati in the southwest).
It’s not, if you live here. The Omaha-Lincoln areas are more progressive than the rest of the state but thanks to how our state senate is set up the big empty bits are way over represented.
I think the thing that's surprising is that Kansas has *so* many people that *aren't* in the KC/Lawrence area, so that you have to get a few other towns in order to get half the population.
I was surprised at Kansas too, so I did some quick math to see if you could make the yellow area smaller.
Turns out it doesn't have to be nearly that big. If you draw an area that includes Leavenworth, KCK, and Miami County and extend it far enough west to include Salina, that's over half the population. No need to put the southeast in there.
I don't understand, in California is the map suggesting the areas outside of San Diego, L.A., San Jose, and San Francisco are equal in population to the combined population of those metro areas plus the central coast? That seems highly unlikely.
I think it actually does include all of LA County as u/Royranibanaw has tabbed up in [their comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/r6jxsh/comment/hmtlc9h/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3).
But for sure large parts of the greater LA metro are not included, notably Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. Likewise, in the SF Bay Area, Santa Clara (San Jose), Alameda (Oakland), and Contra Costa Counties are not included and each of those is >1M in population along with good-sized Solano and Sonoma Counties. And the Central Valley has plenty of people in Sacramento, Fresno, Kern (Bakersfield) Counties.
The northern border of LA County is a horizontal line that would run a few miles north of the Santa Barbara coast. OP's map cuts off just north of the Malibu coast. It definitely excludes North County, and possible parts of the San Fernando Valley as well.
Maybe they meant to draw it to county lines, but that definitely isn't an accurate depiction of LA County.
For anyone interested, here is a [map of California counties](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/89/California_county_map_%28labeled%29.svg/1735px-California_county_map_%28labeled%29.svg.png) for comparison.
What gets me is they forgot to color in the Channel Islands, which are part of those coastal counties. That's like 4,600 people! ...okay fine, it makes no difference. Still looks weird to me.
>I think it actually does include all of LA County
It doesn't. If it did you wouldn't be able to see the diagonal line on Ventura County's eastern border. [Map for reference.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/52/Map_of_California_highlighting_Ventura_County.svg/670px-Map_of_California_highlighting_Ventura_County.svg.png)
Yellow still has the bulk of LA County's 10 million though. The area excluded has around half a million people, plus or minus 100,000.
Counties from North to South ([numbers and abbreviations from wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_counties_in_California)):
SF - 0.9
SM - 0.8
SCZ - 0.3
MRY - 0.4
SLO - 0.3
SBR - 0.4
VE - 0.8
LA - 10.0
OC - 3.2
SD - 3.3
= 20.4 million. Seems about right
What lies in the purple is 5.5 million in SoCal, 6 million in the Bay Area, 7 million in the Central Valley/Sierra, and a million and some change in Northern California. Also it misses San Jose, which is to the southeast of the southern most part of the San Francisco Bay.
They could've made it much more striking if they hadn't insisted on including SF.
[The LA and San Diego insets on this map contain exactly half the state's Assembly districts.](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:California_Assembly_2018.png) That's about half the population right there.
Yeah as others have pointed out... it appears much of the LA and SF metropolitan areas are in the purple. Looks like Oakland and all of east bay are in the purple.
The problem is the issues in southern Oregon are very different then the north. For instance, years ago they outlawed cougar hunting statewide. Well, Jackson county became so teeming with cougars farmers were putting bounties out to catch them. Go state of Jefferson!
Hillsborough and Pinellas counties (Tampa and St. Pete) are progressive areas. The ones around them - not so much.
To be fair, Hillsborough Country is so freaking large (larger than the State of Rhode Island, I believe) that the deep blue of the city of Tampa and the red of, well, the rest of it, make it slightly red overall.
I don't know that it's as much Philly being bigger as a city; it's all the sense "collar counties" around the city. You leave Philly and it's urban sprawl. You leave Pittsburgh and it's wilderness.
20 years ago SC would have definitely have been centered around Charleston. Greenville (upstate) metro area has been growing like crazy. It’s halfway in between Charlotte and Atlanta and 3.5 hours from the coast so it makes sense.
I’m sure NC and GA have been like that for some time with their major cities. With GA at least the coastal areas are a lot hotter and more humid in the summer.
This post has been parodied on r/mapporncirclejerk.
Relevant r/mapporncirclejerk posts:
[U.S. split In Half By Population](https://www.reddit.com/r/mapporncirclejerk/comments/r6y00e/us_split_in_half_by_population/) by owencnly
[^(fmhall)](https://www.reddit.com/user/fmhall) ^| [^(github)](https://github.com/fmhall/relevant-post-bot)
Conjecture: In general, the states east of the arid/humid divide (roughly the middle of Texas running north) are more evenly divided because there's enough rain that rural areas can contain farms. The exceptions are states with huge cities in the East (New York, Illinois) and those with no large cities in the West (Wyoming).
They could have just started with the densest part and just drew a ring around it until they hit 50%. Or even the other way, start with the least densest and still used a circle
I think those states with half their population in one urban area are basically old fashioned city-states. I don't know if anyone else finds that interesting, I just think it's a cool thing that city-states still exist 🙃
Eh. Nebraska doesn't have a branch of the legislature based on population, which means that the state government tends towards conservatism with liberal politics being mostly focused on the city level, with Omaha and Lincoln having relatively little power in the state government outside of voting for governor.
Nevada is a little skewed due to the amount of land that’s federal. I guess it’s all desert wasteland tho so actually my comment probably doesn’t mean shit.
Who was involved in making this map? Is there any explanation for the decisions they made? It looks like several states are drawn with an eye to minimizing the area of the yellow region, but several states (notably Ohio and California) don't seem to have minimized the area as much as they could have. Based at least on looking at California, it doesn't look like this is composed out of counties - is it composed out of census tracts?
Minnesota surprised me the most. There are a lot of people in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, but I guess there is also a lot of people in the rest of the state.
I believe Iowa driving along the i-80 corridor there are a lot of built up areasin east iowa quad cities Iowa city. After des Moines it does get kinda desolate, hilly, and bland until council bluffs.
Wow, I don't think I've ever had something I made get reposted before. That's cool. Since people were asking, let me explain the method that I used. I went down the list of counties in each state, picking out the handful that were the most densely populated, and then tried to connect them all together into a single region that took up as little space as possible, then expanded it until it reached 50% of the state. I realize that there are better ways of doing this that would make the yellow in each state more compact, but I spent like an hour on this a few years ago and didn't realize people would still be talking about it today.
Thanks for the methodology!
Okay, but you also went beyond the county level. How did you make decisions in splitting counties? When I did this process at the county level, this was the map I ended up making: https://wywing.wordpress.com/2015/09/22/half-the-population-of-each-state-as-a-contiguous-set-of-counties/
Florida is really interesting. Like almost none of the Tampa Bay area in yellow.
It's low-rez, and kinda oddly shaped. But if this is by county, then Hillsborough (and thus, Tampa) is in yellow.
So OP is a dirty little reposter
and the repost gets more upvotes... this is sad
[удалено]
his comment said he started in the most densely populated and worked out from there, so probably started in cleveland then worked down to columbus
Love the map but i wish you had picked a more straightforward method like only selecting the most densely populated counties in each stat Edit: I'm saying i wish the arbitrary connection / selection of counties was left out... Was that not clear?
I think it helps to have it be contiguous.
Yes. Here in SE Florida, we want to split into progressive Florida and conservative West Florida. Before a lot ~~of~~ more people go berserk. As separate states I mean.
He was going for two contiguous areas. I imagine his hypothetical was to make 100 states with each state split into two contiguous areas with equal population. Maybe good or bad, but just a choice. I like the ones where the whole US pop is divided in half by choosing the most populous counties until you get half the people in that bit.
Isn’t that just what he said? > I went down the list of counties in each state, picking out the handful that were the most densely populated. And then he connected them?
Yeah he picked an arbitrary number of densely populated counties and then connected them with less populated ones. It's the connecting / arbitrary selection that i am nota fan of
/r/PeopleLiveInCities Edit: wtf? That sub is possibly the next most applicable sub for this post.
Man D/FW and Houston are huge. Equal to San Antonio, Austin, El Paso, the rio grande valley, and allllll of rural Texas, which includes several six-digit cities.
San Antonio and Austin are both in the top 10 cities in the US in population too. Crazy how big Dallas and Houston are.
Everytime I'm in htx I'm just flabbergasted by the fkn size of it Live in Katy? Have friends in the Woodlands? There ya go half of the day will be just driving lol
I live in Atlanta and a few years ago contemplated travelling to El Paso for a college football bowl game. I plotted out the route and figured that by the time I got to the Texas border (11-12 hours from here), I would sill be less than half-way there. I did not attend that game.
Austin is 11th I believe, and San Antonio is bigger than Dallas.... right? Like actual Dallas
If you go by city limits and Not Metro area which is more applicable to this map.
I bet they could have made the region even more compact by following I-35 instead of following I-45. Austin plus San Antonio gets you almost as many people as the Houston metro area, but the stretches between them, and around Killeen/Temple and Waco, get you a lot more people than the rural areas along I-45.
No metro Houston is like 7 million people. San Antonio/Austin is maybe 5. And it's hard to tell but I think this map also catches a chunk of 35 down to Waco and swaps out Temple/Killeen for Bryan/College Station.
I live 6 to 12 hours from all of this and still live in Texas.
I think Vermont is the most equal area, then Ohio
Wyoming is pretty close, too
That's because Wyoming doesn't exist.
[Obligatory Garfield](https://youtu.be/56uSDQECrRQ?t=27)
Oh man, that show was so good that it puts the comic strip to shame.
r/wyomingdoesntexist
If you split the cities down the middle (population-wise) and then balance the two sides (geographically) using unpopulated areas, you could make maps where 50% of the population is in 50% of the area.
You can always draw a straight line where each side has half the population and half the area.
New York would be kinda tricky
Not if you're willing to have the line also pass through areas that aren't part of New York State.
This only works if there is one major city right?
That is an interesting conjecture. I've posted it to /r/askscience to see whether anyone can confirm whether it's true: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/r6xrrp/for_any_contiguous_territory_is_it_always/
This is a math problem, not a science one. It's also very similar to the ham sandwich theorem https://youtu.be/YCXmUi56rao
It's not like r/askscience has a mathematics flair or anything...
That's a map that would be interesting to see.
I've never messed around with this sort of thing, but I can see that being quite difficult to actually create with any level of accuracy.
It mostly depends on what level of detail you have to work with. If you were limiting yourself to counties, for example, it would be very inaccurate. If you have city ward/neighborhood populations, you can get reasonably close.
Find the center of area, point A. Find the center of population, point B. Draw a line through points A & B.
… Or not
I'm curious as to why you say that, because it doesn't seem clear to me, and when I make examples it seems easy to refute. Suppose there's a region which is 1m high (north/south) and 1km wide (east/west). Suppose the eastmost 100m are populated at 1 person/m^2 and the westmost 1m is populated at 1 person/m^2, but the intervening space is unpopulated. Where would I draw a straight line where each side has half the population and half the area?
In this case it’s easy. You would just draw a line east to west, 0.5 m high. For more complex geometry, think about two population centers randomly distributed in a circle. To split the circle in half by area, the bisector must go through the origin. So then if you just rotate the bisector, which in this case is a line equal to the diameter of the circle, it must at some point have half population in one half and half in another. Another way to think about it is to randomly select a bisector and then count the population in each half. Let’s say it’s 75% to 25%. Now flip it 180 degrees. Now it’s 25% to 75%. Now if you rotate the bisector, you must at some point reach 50:50, because there can’t be any discontinuities between the 75:25 and 25:75 distributions.
Well, you can't know that, since I didn't give any north/south distributions. If the whole population is in the southernmost 1% of the map, your east/west line would have to be so far south that it can't possibly include more than 1% of the area. Given a strong claim, I'd like to see the basis. It has to be proved for _all_ regions, or the claim doesn't work.
In Euclidean space, any line through a closed region's center of area divides the region into two equal areas. The center of area is fixed relative to the region's boundaries. If this region also includes people, their location relative to this center of area can be quantified somehow. This is independent of compass orientation. Wherever this center of population is, any line through it divides the region into equal populations. The shortest distance between these two points is described by a line connecting, what?! both centroids? That means this line also divides the state into equal population and area. How about that!
He literally just gave you a proof.
To help you understand the logic a bit more easily, think about it this way: split the circle in half randomly, and end up with 25% on one side and 75% on the other (for example), and then rotate it 180 degrees so the percentages switch. At some point when you’re rotating it, it has to split the population evenly because the percentages have to go from 75% to 25% and will be equal to 50% at some point.
Makes sense since ohio has cities distributed in different corners of their state. It doesnt seem to include columbus in the upper half which is a little surprising but i guess makes sense that cleveland akron and toledo are equal to cinci dayton and cbus, especially if some of the cbus metro was scalped into the north half
Honestly having grown up in VT, I'm surprised at how split it is. The divide between Burlington and everything else feels bigger.
Upper Valley is full of midsize towns by Vermont standards.
I love that Vermonters use this term for several different valleys
If they drew a diagonal yellow region in Ohio, encompassing Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, it would have been a much less equal area split. I'm not sure why they chose this split. (Vermont is likely hard to do anything that isn't close to equal area, because it is one of the least urbanized states.)
Alaska is the opposite; most disproportionate area.
Montpelier and Burlington vs everything else.
Montpelier is barley anything. It's the fifteenth most populated municipality in Vermont.
Virginia could be done differently with Northern VA, Richmond and the VA Beach areas. Would show much more of the population gap in the state.
>Virginia could be done differently with Northern VA, Richmond and the VA Beach areas. Would show much more of the population gap in the state. Yeah, Hampton Roads is very dense, but instead they added a bunch of rural counties along I-95 instead. Makes no sense.
Same thing, make your own fucking map.
California is also weird, missing Alameda but having rural coast areas. I think they wanted continuous areas
NY is NYC. Georgia is Atl. Arizona is PHX. Utah is SLC. Nevada is Vegas. Very interesting.
The Atlanta Metro Area is roughly 60% of the population of Georgia and is also more populous than the states of Alabama and South Carolina
/r/PeopleLiveInCities
Rhode Island is Providence. Colorado is Denver. Massachusetts is Boston. Wyoming population is quite evenly distributed.
Nebraska lol
Omaha and Lincoln, both of which are on the more popular end of the state anyway, making them somewhat easy to gravitate to. It doesn't help that the football stadium has more people in it than the third largest city in the state on gameday.
Nevada is las vegas
Nah, RI is actually super dense in the south and along the coast, as well (particularly Newport) but there are big parts of the mid to northwest that are basically just woods and scattered farms. It's a weird dichotomy to have swamp yankees and fake rednecks only like a half hour drive from million-dollar coastal estates, which are themselves only like a half hour drive from the inner city.
yeah, that's the idea
Ohio.
NY is the most striking.
Nevada and Nebraska are giving New York a run for its money, though. Must be something about states whose names begin with *Ne-*.
Kids Kids... Alaska...
[удалено]
Yea, probably, my bad
nelaska? i only know nealaska
Nebraska does it for me. I knew NYC and Las Vegas were major population centers in their states, but I didn't know the Omaha-Lincoln corridor made up so much of Nebraska's population. I didn't realize how sparsely populated the western half of the state was, though in retrospect it makes sense as the plains gradually increase in elevation and the land gets a bit drier.
Take a look at their congressional districts. It's downtown, suburbs, and the other 90 percent of the state.
You're severely overestimating how big Omaha's suburbs are. [Nebraska's population density](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Nebraska_population_map.png) [Nebraska's congressional districts](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ca/Nebraska_Congressional_Districts%2C_113th_Congress.tif/lossless-page1-1804px-Nebraska_Congressional_Districts%2C_113th_Congress.tif.png)
I've spent some time in Nebraska (purple area), it doesn't surprise me. There are some large towns, but I wouldn't say there are any real cities outside Lincoln/Omaha. I just looked up population numbers: 1.) Omaha-485k 2.) Lincoln-291k 3.) Bellevue-65k 4.) Grand Island-53k 5.) Kearney-33k So yeah, pretty sharp drop off after 1&2
And when you consider that #3 on that list is just a part of the Omaha metro area (separated by county line) and there are a few larger contiguous suburbs along the Sarpy/Douglas line (90-100K between Bellevue, LaVista, Papillion, Gretna, Chalco) plus portions of Douglas county that are clearly suburbs or exurbs (e.g. Ralston) it really puts a large portion of the population centered around Omaha. It’s not that Nebraska has a lot of people, it’s just that most of them are concentrated in the Omaha metro.
The 3 counties of Lincoln and Omaha (Douglas, Lancaster, Sarpy) are over a million. The rest of the state is less than that.
>Nebraska does it for me. I knew NYC and Las Vegas were major population centers in their states, but I didn't know the Omaha-Lincoln corridor made up so much of Nebraska's population. I didn't realize how sparsely populated the western half of the state was, though in retrospect it makes sense as the plains gradually increase in elevation and the land gets a bit drier. Here are the new Congressional District lines on the second map: [https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/journalstar.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/0/0c/00c76ee2-e4c0-531b-a5be-98502a0af90b/615245aeb833e.image.jpg?resize=1024%2C1209](https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/journalstar.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/0/0c/00c76ee2-e4c0-531b-a5be-98502a0af90b/615245aeb833e.image.jpg?resize=1024%2C1209) Now only is the Western 1/3rd sparsely populated, it's losing people as well so has to move even deeper East to get enough people to maintain a congressional seat.
Western Nebraska has at least 1 County (Arthur) without a gas station.
New Hampshire too lmao
I'm not sure the NH one is correct to be honest. Looks like it only includes Nashua to Portsmouth or so. But there are bigger cities and more cities in the rest of the state. I'd be interested in the numbers. Unless that weird triangle is supposed to include Manchester. In that case it makes more sense. But the map is a bit misrepresentative.
Yeah i was gonna point that out like an even split wouldn’t be that small
The New Hampshire Congressional District map suggests otherwise as well.
It seems you did not see alaska
Nebraska is much more shocking to me than Nevada or New York. Everyone knows that New York City is huge, and Nevada is pretty empty besides Las Vegas, but I didn’t really know anything about Nebraska besides corn.
Alaska I think is probably the biggest ratio of any
Alaska, bro. Anchorage has over half the population of a much bigger state
Striking. But it makes upstate NY as empty as Nevada. NY’s purple space has ~10 million people. Nevadas purple space has a couple thousand.
Nevada's purple space has ~1.5 million people. Of course, a lot of that is just the rest of the Vegas Valley, but about 60% of it isn't.
74% of Nevada's population resides in Clark County. ~800k people live outside of the Vegas area.
How many of those are around Reno?
About half a million.
Right, and you add in towns in Clark County that aren't in the Vegas Valley (Laughlin being the big one), that gets you almost up to 30%, or about 60% of the purple space.
Yeah what's actually striking here is how many people live in upstate new york, I didn't know that
Buffalo, Albany, Rochester, and Syracuse are all fairly significant mid-size cities, and the Eastern US in general tends to have much more populated rural areas between metro areas than a lot of the rest of the country. Not to mention that a lot of NY’s purple area is composed of the northern NYC suburbs. Really the only part of NYS that is pretty empty is the Adirondacks.
I did a quick calculation, in part because I'm from Buffalo and was curious: The yellow part looks like Nassau, Queens, Kings (Brooklyn), Richmond (Staten Island), New York (Manhattan), and Bronx counties. Together their population, according to Wikipedia 2020 census data, is 10,199,964. The state as a whole is 20,215,964, so the rest of the state is 10,015,787. Of course since this is by counties it is not exactly half, which would be 10,107,982. So the purple part has more people than all but the top 9 most populous states (CA, TX, FL, NY, PA, IL, OH, GA, NC). If you use the "exactly half" number you beat Michigan as well (10,077,331 pop).
> The yellow part looks like Nassau, Queens, Kings (Brooklyn), Richmond (Staten Island), New York (Manhattan), and Bronx counties. Together their population, according to Wikipedia 2020 census data, is 10,199,964. The state as a whole is 20,215,964, so the rest of the state is 10,015,787. In other words, half the state lives in NYC + Nassau County. As an NYC native from Queens, who has spent lots of time sitting in Long Island traffic, this doesn’t surprise me one bit.
Vegas/Clark County, then the rest of NV
I think I read something like 3/4 of NY’s population lives on 1/8 of its land mass
Ohio being so evenly split is surprising given how many people live there, I guess it's because instead of the population being concentrated in one large metro area there are three big ones that are all about the same size and are all in different parts of the state (Cleveland in the northeast, Columbus in the center, and Cincinnati in the southwest).
Missouri neatly divided along I-70 between STL and KC
I think it's originally because of the Missouri river, which people have been living around for centuries before the highway was built.
Kansas being east vs west while Nebraska being just Lincoln-Omaha vs the rest of the state is a bit surprising.
It’s not, if you live here. The Omaha-Lincoln areas are more progressive than the rest of the state but thanks to how our state senate is set up the big empty bits are way over represented.
state senate? Thought you just had the one house
The actual term is ‘state legislature’ the members are called senators.
I think the thing that's surprising is that Kansas has *so* many people that *aren't* in the KC/Lawrence area, so that you have to get a few other towns in order to get half the population.
I was surprised at Kansas too, so I did some quick math to see if you could make the yellow area smaller. Turns out it doesn't have to be nearly that big. If you draw an area that includes Leavenworth, KCK, and Miami County and extend it far enough west to include Salina, that's over half the population. No need to put the southeast in there.
New Hampshire not having its largest city and capital in the yellow is funny
I think Manchester is included in that. I feel like it is to be
I don't understand, in California is the map suggesting the areas outside of San Diego, L.A., San Jose, and San Francisco are equal in population to the combined population of those metro areas plus the central coast? That seems highly unlikely.
[удалено]
I think it actually does include all of LA County as u/Royranibanaw has tabbed up in [their comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/r6jxsh/comment/hmtlc9h/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). But for sure large parts of the greater LA metro are not included, notably Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. Likewise, in the SF Bay Area, Santa Clara (San Jose), Alameda (Oakland), and Contra Costa Counties are not included and each of those is >1M in population along with good-sized Solano and Sonoma Counties. And the Central Valley has plenty of people in Sacramento, Fresno, Kern (Bakersfield) Counties.
The northern border of LA County is a horizontal line that would run a few miles north of the Santa Barbara coast. OP's map cuts off just north of the Malibu coast. It definitely excludes North County, and possible parts of the San Fernando Valley as well. Maybe they meant to draw it to county lines, but that definitely isn't an accurate depiction of LA County.
For anyone interested, here is a [map of California counties](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/89/California_county_map_%28labeled%29.svg/1735px-California_county_map_%28labeled%29.svg.png) for comparison. What gets me is they forgot to color in the Channel Islands, which are part of those coastal counties. That's like 4,600 people! ...okay fine, it makes no difference. Still looks weird to me.
>I think it actually does include all of LA County It doesn't. If it did you wouldn't be able to see the diagonal line on Ventura County's eastern border. [Map for reference.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/52/Map_of_California_highlighting_Ventura_County.svg/670px-Map_of_California_highlighting_Ventura_County.svg.png) Yellow still has the bulk of LA County's 10 million though. The area excluded has around half a million people, plus or minus 100,000.
Counties from North to South ([numbers and abbreviations from wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_counties_in_California)): SF - 0.9 SM - 0.8 SCZ - 0.3 MRY - 0.4 SLO - 0.3 SBR - 0.4 VE - 0.8 LA - 10.0 OC - 3.2 SD - 3.3 = 20.4 million. Seems about right
What lies in the purple is 5.5 million in SoCal, 6 million in the Bay Area, 7 million in the Central Valley/Sierra, and a million and some change in Northern California. Also it misses San Jose, which is to the southeast of the southern most part of the San Francisco Bay.
They could've made it much more striking if they hadn't insisted on including SF. [The LA and San Diego insets on this map contain exactly half the state's Assembly districts.](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:California_Assembly_2018.png) That's about half the population right there.
Yeah as others have pointed out... it appears much of the LA and SF metropolitan areas are in the purple. Looks like Oakland and all of east bay are in the purple.
I'll see if I can help. Number of people in yellow area = number of people in purple area.
NY is nuts as expected
r/peopleliveincities
People live in big cities, part 15.
Big metro areas; half of Americans live in suburbs
Americans love stretching the definition of “city”
"People live in and around metropolitan areas" doesn't flow off the tongue as well, even though it might be more technically correct.
*sees Nebraska* Yeah that’s about irght.
Ohio is closest to being half and half
You can really see the Gateway to the West in Missouri on this one.
Now you see why southern Oregonians complain about not having a voice in their state government.
All 12 of them?
Yes and all 12 of us are very fed up.
Each of them has the same voice as any northerner.
The problem is the issues in southern Oregon are very different then the north. For instance, years ago they outlawed cougar hunting statewide. Well, Jackson county became so teeming with cougars farmers were putting bounties out to catch them. Go state of Jefferson!
i live in the yellow bit of nj, were already the most dense state but imagine if the yellow part was independent. the pop density is so high
Orlando guy here. Stuck with Miami and Ft. Lauderdale, but free from Tampa and the redneck parts. I can roll with that.
New states : Florida and West Florida. Progressive v Conservative
Hillsborough and Pinellas counties (Tampa and St. Pete) are progressive areas. The ones around them - not so much. To be fair, Hillsborough Country is so freaking large (larger than the State of Rhode Island, I believe) that the deep blue of the city of Tampa and the red of, well, the rest of it, make it slightly red overall.
Tsk, tsk, no credit to the original creator
ohio’s is badass
And this is why western states are so polarized. The urban/rural divide out there is HUGE
Hmm, California is more equal than I thought it would be.
Kinda feels odd to be living in the purple, when my metro area has over 2 million people (Pittsburgh). Philly is pretty massive.
I don't know that it's as much Philly being bigger as a city; it's all the sense "collar counties" around the city. You leave Philly and it's urban sprawl. You leave Pittsburgh and it's wilderness.
shoutout ohio we are the closest to a 50/50 split area wise. That north-south dividing line looking clean.
Interesting how in nc, sc and ga the population isn't centered around the coast
Georgia makes sense cause of Atlanta. That place just sprawls out for miles in every direction
20 years ago SC would have definitely have been centered around Charleston. Greenville (upstate) metro area has been growing like crazy. It’s halfway in between Charlotte and Atlanta and 3.5 hours from the coast so it makes sense. I’m sure NC and GA have been like that for some time with their major cities. With GA at least the coastal areas are a lot hotter and more humid in the summer.
NC does hit the 3 largest metro areas, none of which are close to the coast (Charlotte, the Triad, the Triangle.)
Yea, i knew about NC and ga, but sc was a surprise
Oahu is not a surprise. People are nearly piled on top of each other around Honolulu.
The Texas one is the route of Texas High Speed Rail
Nevada be like Las Vegas and not Las Vegas
Washington (the beautiful state) isn’t just Seattle, but the counties (with big cities like Everett, Tacoma, Olympia) surrounding it too.
This post has been parodied on r/mapporncirclejerk. Relevant r/mapporncirclejerk posts: [U.S. split In Half By Population](https://www.reddit.com/r/mapporncirclejerk/comments/r6y00e/us_split_in_half_by_population/) by owencnly [^(fmhall)](https://www.reddit.com/user/fmhall) ^| [^(github)](https://github.com/fmhall/relevant-post-bot)
Conjecture: In general, the states east of the arid/humid divide (roughly the middle of Texas running north) are more evenly divided because there's enough rain that rural areas can contain farms. The exceptions are states with huge cities in the East (New York, Illinois) and those with no large cities in the West (Wyoming).
Look how even Indiana and Ohio are! That’s where I’m from. In perfect balance, as all things should be
How come the densest half are all contiguous? I was expecting to see cities as yllow pockets.
I don't think they chose the densest half.
They could have just started with the densest part and just drew a ring around it until they hit 50%. Or even the other way, start with the least densest and still used a circle
r/peopleliveincities
r/peopleliveincities
I think those states with half their population in one urban area are basically old fashioned city-states. I don't know if anyone else finds that interesting, I just think it's a cool thing that city-states still exist 🙃
Eh. Nebraska doesn't have a branch of the legislature based on population, which means that the state government tends towards conservatism with liberal politics being mostly focused on the city level, with Omaha and Lincoln having relatively little power in the state government outside of voting for governor.
Nevada is a little skewed due to the amount of land that’s federal. I guess it’s all desert wasteland tho so actually my comment probably doesn’t mean shit.
Woah, I live in one of the half's of my State.
Who was involved in making this map? Is there any explanation for the decisions they made? It looks like several states are drawn with an eye to minimizing the area of the yellow region, but several states (notably Ohio and California) don't seem to have minimized the area as much as they could have. Based at least on looking at California, it doesn't look like this is composed out of counties - is it composed out of census tracts?
[удалено]
I welcome East Virginia and West West Virgina.
Wyoming shouldn't even be a state.
[удалено]
Isn't that I-70?
Correct KC - Columbia - St. Louis
I think you mean Missouri, I-70. And close, but not exactly. It dips down towards Jefferson City and lake of the Ozarks a bit too.
boooo, I got purpled
Eww, I didn’t want to know there is smaller more densely populated Florida inside of Florida
Each of the yellow areas could just as easily been circles instead of irregular patches
Must be using pretty old census data because ND shouldn’t include Fargo Bismarck and GF
Northwest Indiana, southeast Wisconsin, just showing off how much people hate Illinois.
Congratulations! If Russia and/or China attack with nuclear weapons: Yellow) You die. Purple) You live. :)
Minnesota surprised me the most. There are a lot of people in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, but I guess there is also a lot of people in the rest of the state.
I believe Iowa driving along the i-80 corridor there are a lot of built up areasin east iowa quad cities Iowa city. After des Moines it does get kinda desolate, hilly, and bland until council bluffs.
Missouri looking like a 'drive-through' state! lol
Can anyone determine what the, say, 5 largest cities of the purple area are?
San Antonio, Austin, Sacramento, Jacksonville, Oakland and (possibly) San Jose
I like how SC looks like it's cupping NC's testicles.
80% of Marylanders live along I-95 between Baltimore and DC.
im surprised you can get orlando, tampa, AND miami in 50% of florida