Comment Re:That's the police for you (Score 1) 277
Hence why I said lives in cities. NYC has 8.2M people, then it's 3.8M, 2.7M, 2.1M, and 1.5M for the top five cities in the US. There's a long tail, but the population of the US is about 400M, which indicates the vast majority do not live in any of the major cities.
Now, people often say they live in [closest city] for simplicity sake, so it's easy to assume everyone lives in a city. Overall population density has also increased , which makes the US census's "urban" classification kinda useless. So I said "city" to express a concept of places with a population density so high as include dozens or hundreds of people within GPS's margin of error.
For some paper napkin math, the US has an average (and roughly median) population density of 88 people per square mile, with most states around 50 - 300. High-balling that with 500 people per square mile (top five states), that's one person per 55,757 square feet. Most people cluster into families, with an average household size of 2.5, so that's a 373 ft x 373 ft area. Worst case GPS accuracy is within 2000 square feet 95% of the time.
Now, people often say they live in [closest city] for simplicity sake, so it's easy to assume everyone lives in a city. Overall population density has also increased , which makes the US census's "urban" classification kinda useless. So I said "city" to express a concept of places with a population density so high as include dozens or hundreds of people within GPS's margin of error.
For some paper napkin math, the US has an average (and roughly median) population density of 88 people per square mile, with most states around 50 - 300. High-balling that with 500 people per square mile (top five states), that's one person per 55,757 square feet. Most people cluster into families, with an average household size of 2.5, so that's a 373 ft x 373 ft area. Worst case GPS accuracy is within 2000 square feet 95% of the time.