The chart above shows the miles of waterways per square mile of land in US regions. The South has some of the states with the greatest waterway coverage so it is no surprise that it leads other regions in this metric.
Findings
- The difference between the region with the greatest waterway coverage, the South, and the region with the least, the West, is 0.01 miles.
- The South has 3.35 times the waterway coverage that the West does.
- Only the Northeast and the South have more than 0.01 miles of waterways for every square mile of land.
Caveats
- Waterway data is from 2013.
- Area data is from 2010.
- Waterway and area data come from different sources.
- All figures are rounded to the nearest thousandth.
- Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Utah, Vermont, and Wyoming did not have any waterway data.
- The Southern US consists of Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Virginia.
- The Northeastern US consists of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
- The Midwestern US consists of Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
- The Western US consists of California, Washington, Colorado, Arizona, Oregon, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Hawaii, Idaho, Alaska, Montana, and Wyoming.
Details
The South also leads in total waterways, with the Northeast being the only region to fare better in waterway coverage than in total waterways.
The United States as a whole has 0.011 miles of waterways for every square mile of land ranking it under the South and just above the Northeast.
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. 2015. "State Transportation by the Numbers." Accessed March 21, 2018. https://www.bts.gov/sites/bts.dot.gov/files/legacy/_entire.pdf.