City Density Comparisons
Discussions focus on comparing population sizes, densities, and metro areas of cities like San Francisco, New York, London, Tokyo, and others, debating appropriate metrics such as city proper versus metropolitan populations and urban density.
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SF and Seattle have populations under 1 million in the city proper. London and NY are something like 8 and 9 million respectively. So I suspect population size matters (and density too).
He's not - he's comparing them to two of the densest cities in the Bay Area (San Francisco and San Jose). The New York boroughs each have a bit less than half the land area of their Bay Area equivalents, but have much higher populations.
Density within cities, and a countries' population density are not comparable
They should replace this with a density metric. If a city is big enough, it becomes just "cities" next to each other. The difference is in central density and time from the extremities to the center. In this case, Chongqing, HongKong and Paris are denser than say Los Angeles; even though the Los Angeles metro area has a comparable/higher number of people.
On a planetary scale, I wouldn't actually consider that 'pretty fucking big'. For comparison (metro areas, figures from Wikipedia):San Francisco: 4.7 millionBerlin: 6.1 millionLondon: 14.3 millionNYC: 20.1 millionShenzhen: 23.3 millionTokyo: 37.5 million
But both of those cities have their metropolitan areas measured in tens of millions of people, versus SF in the single millions. SF has the rates of a city ten times its size because its population density is so constrained.
Compare the density of SF to the one on NYC. It clearly has helped more people.
The population of Switzerland is ~9 million. The population of LA metro is around 15 million, and NYC metro aroound 20 millionLA "the city" might be less but you can't tell where LA ends and it's other parts begin. It's one giant metropolis. Same with NYC.
Even then it should be compared to a city in the US as they would sometimes not even be a top 10 by metroplex population
Put more concretely: the population of NYC proper (ignoring the broader metro) and Switzerland are pretty comparable (both around 8-9m people), but NYC is about 50x more dense (300 mi² vs 16000).