The latest issue of Access magazine (published by the UC Transportation Center at UC Berkeley) has an interesting article about density in the LA metropolitan region. It looks at both average density and perceived density. The Los Angeles metro region has the nation's highest average density (number of people divided by the amount of land), higher than both NY and SF.
Image courtesy of UC Transportation Center
The article notes that population in the LA metro region is much more evenly distributed than other large urban areas such as New York, San Francisco, or DC. This leads the author of the article to use perceived density as a measure of how dense a region is.
The article notes:
"A good way of conceptualizing the difference between "standard density" and "perceived density" is that where standard density measures the average amount of land around each resident of a city, perceived density measures the average number of people around each resident of that city. Measuring perceived density involves four steps: 1. Divide the city into small geographic units such as census tracts. 2. Calculate the standard density of each of these census tracts. 3. Assign a weight to each census tract that is equal to its share of the total population of the city. 4. Average the weighted densities of all of the city's census tracts. This produces a weighted or "perceived" density for the city."
Based on this measure of density, the NY metropolitan area is nearly three times as dense and the Los Angeles metropolitan region. LA is denser, however, than Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston, all cities thought by most people to be older, dense pre-WWII cities.
Image courtesy of UC Transportation Center
http://www.uctc.net/access/37/access37_sprawl.shtml
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