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Comment by anyonecancode | Hacker News Reader

> Here are some images from Street View - and recall that this is what about 25,000 people per sq km density looks like in London. This is half the density of the highest density places in Paris, Barcelona or New York, and about a quarter of the highest densities globally (found in cities like Manila, Cairo and Dhaka).

Huh -- high-density London looks like.. Queens, NYC?

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NYC has a very large variation of density, from skyscrapers packed near each other to relaxed areas of 2-3-story buildings. Interestingly, it's not just packed Manhattan vs deep two-story Brooklyn. Manhattan is very uneven and has both 100-story buildings and 3-story buildings maybe a couple miles apart, and it's not downtown vs outskirts, but the general urban mix.

I remember reading somewhere that Los Angeles metro has higher population density than NYC metro.

I think the trick is the "metro." I've never been to LA, but have lived in NYC proper and now out in the greater "metro" and this does seem plausible to me, depending on how the metro is defined. If you look at a satellite map of LA, everything is squeezed into the valleys, but west and north of NYC city limits at least there's a lot more room to spread out (LI is more constrained) so that even though it's dense compared to, say, Omaha, I can well believe it's less dense than the LA basin and surrounding valleys.

I live about 13 miles west of the city as the crow flies, and its already suburban and not overly dense here, and just get more so west of here, still firmly within the metro.

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