The chart above shows road lengths per thousand people in US regions. The Midwest has more than triple the length of roads per person than the Northeast has.
Findings
- The difference between the region with the most roads per capita, the Midwest, and the region with the least, the Northeast, is 13.86 miles.
- The Midwest has 3.00 times the roads per capita that the Northeast does.
- Only the Midwest has more than 20 miles of roads per thousand inhabitants.
- Only the Northeast has less than 10 miles of roads per thousand inhabitants.
Caveats
- Population data is from 2010.
- Road length data is from 2015.
- Road and population data come from different sources.
- 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.
- The Midwestern US consists of Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
- The Southern US consists of Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Virginia.
- The Western US consists of California, Washington, Colorado, Arizona, Oregon, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Hawaii, Idaho, Alaska, Montana, and Wyoming.
- The Northeastern US consists of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
Details
Even though the Southern state with the most miles of road per person is ranked eighth, the South manages to surpass the West as a region in this metric.
The United States as a whole has 13.47 miles of road for every thousand inhabitants ranking it under the South and above the West.
Sources
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.