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Comment by voidreaper | Hacker News Reader

Here's an interactive map of the growing Pearl River Delta megalopolis: https://geoshen.com/posts/the-pearl-river-delta-megalopolis

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>The PRD megalopolis is an urban area of gargantuan proportions with few like it in existance.

>It's home to 65 million people, a population similar to that of the United Kingdom.

>It covers an area around 55,000 km^2, about the size of the country of Croatia.

>The GDP of the PRD megalopolis clocks in at over $1.2 trillion, about the same as Mexico.

Well damn, I live in Croatia, can't even make a mental image of that amount of people. For comparison its the same area size as New York state with over 3x the population.

And Croatia's town (like Split) leaves impression like a really crowded place. At least for me as person from North Europe country.

That's because of atrocious urban planning. Traditional Mediterranean streets were never meant for cars. Municipal governments, instead of having a clear strategy where historic city centers are preserved and everything else is bulldozed to make room for proper, modern urban design have instead opted to have no plan whatsoever. As a consequence, there is now nowhere to park, the streets are hard to navigate (even for locals) and things like sidewalks and bike lanes are pure fantasy in many of Croatia's coastal cities.

Car oriented cities are a bad idea.

You can't really take the one of the most visited and touristy places in Croatia and consider it the average.

By comparison the largest city Zagreb of about a million people, which is a quarter of the entire population, has the density of 1300 people per km2, that's about 1/3 or 1/4 of the pop. density of Berlin or Stockholm.

Compared to Norway which is the least populated country on the continent, Croatia has the same population in 20% of the space.

But it's not just tourists. I had an internship at the uni in Split, and that thing has like 10 floors.

Minor note: Wikipedia says that the size of New York state is 141,300km² (54,555 sq mi), so New York is almost thrice the size with less than one third of the population.

To be fair, NY state is large and sparsely populated. The NY Metro area is much smaller and more dense but includes parts of several states.

The NY Metropolitan Statistical Area is 20.3 million residents in 17,405 km2, according to Wikipedia.

So the PRD is basically three NY metro areas.

Very interesting article, thanks!

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