The chart above shows road lengths per thousand people in EU and US states. The top ten states are all from the US with the leading EU state in this metric showing up 12th.
Findings
- The difference between the state with the most roads per capita, North Dakota, and the state with the least, Romania, is 127.28 miles.
- North Dakota has 57.25 times the roads per capita that Romania does.
- Five states have more than 50 miles of road for every thousand inhabitants all of which are from the US.
- Ten states have less than 5 miles of road for every thousand inhabitants (only two of which are from the US).
- The mean miles of road for every thousand inhabitants for the US is 23.09 and the median 16.37.
- The mean miles of road for every thousand inhabitants for the EU is 8.81 and the median 7.72.
- The mean miles of road for every thousand inhabitants for the EU and the US combined is 18.08 and the median 12.26.
Caveats
- EU population data is from 2011; US population data is from 2010.
- EU road length data is from 2008 except for Denmark which is from 2006, and Italy and Portugal which are from 2005; US road length data is from 2015.
- Road and population data come from different sources.
- EU and US data come from different sources.
- Bulgaria is not included because it did not have complete data in the road data set.
- The road network is very limited in Alaska, so much so that the state capital is not connected by road, and one in 78 people are pilots.
- All figures are rounded to the nearest hundredth.
Details
The leading US state, North Dakota, has four times the roads that the leading EU state, Estonia, has for every thousand inhabitants. It should be noted that this metric has a strong inverse relationship with population density. A future post will look at the correlation between the two.
The European Union as a whole has 6.59 miles of road for every thousand inhabitants ranking it just under Greece and just above Florida. The United States as a whole has 13.47 miles of road for every thousand inhabitants ranking it just under Louisiana and just above Georgia.
Sources
European Union Road Federation. 2011. "European Road Statistics 2011." Accessed March 12, 2018. http://www.irfnet.eu/images/stories/Statistics/2011/ERF-2011-STATS.pdf.
Eurostat. 2017. "Data Explorer." Accessed December 11, 2017. http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=urb_lpop1&lang=en.
United States Census Bureau. "Annual Estimates of the Resident Population: April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2016." Accessed December 12, 2017. http://factfinder2.census.gov.
United States Department of Transportation. 2016. "Table HM-10M - Highway Statistics 2015 - Policy | Federal Highway Administration." Accessed March 12, 2018. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2015/hm10m.cfm.