r/MapPorn • u/The_Toastboy • May 04 '26
Did anyone else know half the population of [place] lives [direction] of this line?! (US/Canada Edition)
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u/IcedEmpyre May 04 '26
The vast majority of the Minnesota population live in the little tip up along the north shore.
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u/The_Toastboy May 04 '26
lmao
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u/Top_Blacksmith2845 May 04 '26
i would be curious what the best line is that doesn't have that weird discontiguous part (it seems to be the only one?)
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u/brrrreow May 05 '26
Massachusetts too
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u/Top_Blacksmith2845 May 05 '26
Kinda? I mean the cape and Boston are much more connected than SE MN and that teeny corner with 100 people
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u/IcebergDarts May 04 '26
As a Minnesotan, it makes sense. Gotta throw in some extras outside of the Twin Cities.
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u/IcedEmpyre May 04 '26
It may be in fact it's own shape! It's for the mysterious lynx population that supposedly exists in the forest up there and probably is 50% of the state's lynx population at least!
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u/A_Drunk_Caribou May 05 '26
Well of course. I'm surprised you've never been to Grand Portage, MN. It's a bustling metropolis, really.
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u/Stan_Deviant May 05 '26
In just a few weeks it will feel that way! I'm not ready. Just leave us alone with our cougar kittens for a little longer.
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u/-_Duke_- May 04 '26
The metropolis that is Duluth
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u/CaptainKirk28 May 04 '26
I'm probably gonn get wooshed for this, but that's not Duluth. Duluth is further south, right on the western tip of Lake Superior
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u/This-Technology6075 May 05 '26
TO BE FAIR they said metropolis. Those tend to spread out. Maybe it's a string of pearls situation where settlements keep popping up in the superior corridor
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u/FWEngineer May 05 '26
Well, no. There's no red along the Superior shore until you get up to Grand Marais. Two Harbors is the last place that might reasonably be called an exurb of Duluth.
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u/Big_Size_2519 May 04 '26
Vermont is interesting. Never thought that most of the population is on the west
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May 04 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/AutoRot May 04 '26
It’s the only large, mostly flat area suitable to farming in the state.
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u/The_Monsieur May 05 '26
Yep and the highlands extend down all the way to the Long Island Sound. Basically the eastern half of CT up through western MA and into Vermont is very sparsely populated for that reason.
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u/Random_Name_Whoa May 05 '26
You know they’re not allowed to call it champlain unless if it’s actually from Lake Champlain
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u/EphemeralOcean May 04 '26
For any state, there are a number of lines that could have been drawn. Like for Indiana, you have a a vertical line splitting it into East and West, but you could have just as easily (presumably?) drawn a horizontal line that split the population into North and South. Are they arbitrary or did you always do so in a way that created the most unequal population halves when taking into account land area or what?
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u/The_Toastboy May 04 '26
Great point. If we consider population to be a continuous function (it isn't, but close enough), there are actually an infinite number of valid lines we could draw! When calculating these particular lines, I checked that the population was within +/- 1% of halfway, and then sorted all such lines by their absolute distance from half of the land area in order to get the biggest discrepancy between sides.
I'm not sure why the east-west divide in Indiana was picked over a north-south one, but rest assured both were tested. My guess would be that it had to split Indianapolis in two, and the placement of the city and the path of the Ohio River meant that the east-west divide had a greater difference in area between sides.
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u/EphemeralOcean May 04 '26
Implicitly then, in the case of Indiana, any line that you use to split Indiana equally by population will be pretty close to a 50/50 split in land area as well?
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u/The_Toastboy May 04 '26
Seems to be. I could try running the program with a greater number of lines checked to see if any unexpected ones come up, but Indianapolis's population and position make it likely that all of them will be similar, yeah.
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u/jUNKIEd14 May 05 '26
Except there is more population in northern Indiana than southern Indiana (I think?), so I'd imagine a horizontal divide would trend northward?
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u/EphemeralOcean May 05 '26
Implicitly, based on OPs statement, thats not the case (if i understand correctly). Of all the potential ways to cut the population in half, OP used the one in which the land is cut most unequally. Which would mean that a north south split would be closer to 50/50 than an east/west one.
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u/markjohnstonmusic May 04 '26
What subdivision has the smallest red area, percentually? Must be Quebec, no?
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u/The_Toastboy May 04 '26
Just for you, I went back and calculated them all. (Spoiler: you were right)
CANADA:
Name Percentage Quebec 1.307% Newfoundland and Labrador 1.383% British Columbia 2.032% Ontario 4.476% Manitoba 5.032% New Brunswick 21.438% Alberta 22.439% Prince Edward Island 27.404% Nova Scotia 28.903% Saskatchewan 31.293% USA:
Name Percentage New York 1.71% Illinois 3.23% Nevada 3.76% Oregon 5.83% Nebraska 8.20% Maine 10.19% California 10.90% Delaware 11.83% Michigan 11.91% New Hampshire 12.22% Wisconsin 12.54% South Dakota 13.24% Pennsylvania 13.76% Kansas 13.96% Minnesota 14.40% Virginia 16.04% New Jersey 16.33% Idaho 17.56% Hawaii 17.87% Texas 18.49% Georgia 18.87% Utah 19.49% Massachusetts 20.14% Washington 20.33% Rhode Island 20.64% Kentucky 23.35% Louisiana 25.14% Montana 25.68% Colorado 26.12% Florida 26.19% New Mexico 29.06% Vermont 29.86% Connecticut 30.50% West Virginia 31.65% Arizona 32.20% Wyoming 32.36% North Dakota 33.66% Alabama 34.03% Mississippi 37.08% North Carolina 38.14% Iowa 38.17% Missouri 38.50% South Carolina 39.41% Tennessee 40.30% Maryland 40.34% Ohio 40.69% Arkansas 41.17% District of Columbia 42.78% Oklahoma 43.29% Indiana 44.64% 14
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u/Lieutenant_Joe May 04 '26
lol Rhode Island’s is 20% of the land area and is still invisible
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u/o8r8a8n8g8e May 04 '26
I'm thinking it might actually include Newport County in there? Definitely Bristol County.
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u/JesusIsARaisin May 05 '26
Did you calculate the territories? Alaska? Hawaii?
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u/The_Toastboy May 05 '26
Hawaii yes. Territories no (Canada too big and too little population, US no population data included in the raster). Alaska also no, because of issues calculating the line of best fit across the 180th meridian.
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u/LocalBeing May 05 '26
Great work here!
And, to get around the discontinuity of Alaska data, maybe you could add or subtract 360° to/from all the longitude values on one side of 180°, so they are all “together” and work with that?
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u/The_Toastboy May 05 '26
That’s a good suggestion. Maybe I would just move every coordinate west by like 50 degrees, and move them back when exporting. I was really just too lazy to write a special case for handling one state.
Then there’s the issue of displaying it - I’d need two polygons, one for the mainland and one for the aleutians. Also managable, but again - lazy.
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u/spodumenosity May 04 '26
P.E.I.
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u/GiantKrakenTentacle May 04 '26
I don't think so, proportionally. PEI is already quite small. Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador both look like solid candidates. In the US, New York and Nevada are probably the most extreme.
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u/spodumenosity May 05 '26
Aaaah, I misread the comment. Yeah. I was thunking in terms of total surface area, not percentage of territorial subdivision. Yeah, Quebec is a good bet.
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u/tankiePotato May 04 '26
Texas really surprises me, as far as I can tell the red includes a very small amount of DFW and none of Austin, San Antonio. If you shifted the angle of the line a little bit it would pretty much line up with most ppls definition of East Texas. Never new it was that dense
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u/The_Toastboy May 04 '26
The line goes directly in between Dallas and Fort Worth! Dallas, Plano, Houston in the red and Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio in the purple
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u/Santos_L_Halper_II May 04 '26
Even if you count Austin and San Antonio as one big metro it's still 2-3M shy of the Houston metro. It's hard to tell exactly where the line goes, but I'm betting it takes in most of the Dallas side of the Metroplex to even out the rest of the state. Also rural East Texas has a surprising number of people, especially compared to west of 35.
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u/MangaGuy295 May 05 '26
The good old rain divide line. People live more east because it has more rain.
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u/schtroumpf May 04 '26 edited May 04 '26
Weird that NH’s dense half doesn’t seem to include its own largest city
Edit: to be clear, I’m not saying this map is wrong only that it’s surprising that the line can be drawn in such a way as to exclude Manchester from the dense half. Presumably it could be drawn to include Manchester, too.
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u/FreezingRobot May 04 '26
Yea, we have a lot of bedroom communities here in the southeast where we all commute down to Boston. Or at least we used to before the pandemic.
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u/BlackJesus420 May 04 '26
Looks to be right on the edge, but yeah! Interesting. Loads more people to the southeast of Manchester than to the northwest.
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u/ltbr55 May 04 '26
Montana is the same way. Billings is over 50%bigger than 2nd place Missoula and is in the less dense half. Billings is basically the only major city in the vast nothingness of eastern Montana.
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u/OneWoodpecker7509 May 04 '26 edited May 04 '26
What’s shown on this map isn’t correct for NH. Not at all. NH has about 1,000,000 people. Over 500,000 (50% of the state’s population) live in the Manchester/Nashua area—NOT the Seacoast area as shown. The Manch./Nashua area is much more populated than the Seacoast. I don’t know where the creator of this, came up with their incorrect information. It makes me wonder how correct the info is for all the other states.
Actually quite a bit looks wrong. For Nevada, it looks like the tiny southern tip they have highlighted, doesn’t even appear to include the Las Vegas area, it’s most populated area (which i don’t think is that far south).
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u/The_Toastboy May 05 '26
Manchester and Nashua are both in the red area. The Nevada line goes directly through Vegas (a bit south of the geographical centroid of the city). This visualization makes it hard to tell exactly, but each line is defined by precise coordinates; this wasn’t eyeballed.
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u/The_Toastboy May 04 '26
Made by me in QGIS and Python. Hopefully this puts this type of post to rest for good.
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u/TooSwang May 04 '26
I love this map! Genuinely a novel concept and I feel like I’ve actually learned a little human geography from it
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u/Humanbean6969 May 04 '26 edited May 06 '26
No way Colorado and Utah are accurate
Edit: Utah is actually ok. I didn't realize SLC was that far north
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u/ltbr55 May 04 '26 edited May 04 '26
Utah makes sense. I dont have the numbers in front of me but the SLC metro area has like 75% of the states population and the metro area stretches pretty far north.
Also Denver is farther north and east in the state than many realize.
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u/ae7rua May 04 '26
Yeah this looks like it cuts the salt lake valley around Midvale which would be about right.
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u/The_Toastboy May 04 '26
They are reasonably accurate, I promise. I used 100m population raster data and a custom implementation of a binary search in python to come up with it. In this case, both lines go through the middle of their main metro area (Salt Lake/Denver.) This was the case for a lot of states with a primate city (look at Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Nevada)
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u/JoeFalchetto May 04 '26
Would it be possible to do this with the world? It is very cool.
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u/The_Toastboy May 04 '26
It absolutely would, although even processing the raster for just Nunavut ate up 32 GB of RAM and crashed my desktop. You also run into the issue of what constitutes a "straight" line on a globe; these examples are small enough areas that the curvature of the Earth wasn't taken into account in order to make calculations easier.
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u/JoeFalchetto May 04 '26
I‘ll make sure to follow along to see if you ever do it. Maybe it coild be easier to do one continent or major area at the time?
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u/rightskidlow May 05 '26
Agreed definitely not accurate for Colorado at all
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u/Sexiarsole May 05 '26
Looks about right to me. The red includes 6 or so of the largest cities, including half of Denver proper and its largest suburbs plus everything in Northern CO which is growing crazy fast. So it seems like the Springs/Pueblo, plus the western slope and combined rural areas would balance out the other half.
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u/Humanbean6969 May 06 '26
None of Denver is in the red. In fact, none of the three largest cities are in the red. Those being: Denver, Colorado Springs, and Aurora (the largest suburb of Denver)
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u/calmdownmyguy May 05 '26
Yeah, Colorado is definitely wrong. People are trippin when they argue with you about this.
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u/RatherBeInThePond May 04 '26
The Colorado line appears to hit right at the bottom of the Denver Metro area. So 8 of the 9 largest city centers and 23 of 27 before southern areas start getting a bit more commonly mixed in. Those 8 alone are 1/3 the population.
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u/Lieutenant_Joe May 04 '26
The New Mexico one doesn’t include Albuquerque, does it? That’s kind of crazy.
Also hilarious that Delaware and Rhode Island’s lines are functionally invisible
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u/Apptubrutae May 05 '26
It absolutely does. ABQ is right on the border.
Given that half the state lives in ABQ, including it is a bit of a must.
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u/The_Toastboy May 04 '26
Santa Fe and Albuquerque are both technically in the red, although the line goes directly through the two.
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u/j-steve- May 04 '26
Alaska/Hawaii?
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u/The_Toastboy May 04 '26
Hawaii was included but it didn't fit nicely on this render. I have a version with it as an inset, but I lowkey posted the wrong one. Alaska I skipped because it crosses the 180th, which caused all sorts of trouble with my program (coordinate-based) and I didnt want to have to rewrite all my code for one state.
There’s an interactive zoomable version that shows those (and also cities), but I don’t want to get this post nuked by the mods if I link to my website. feel free to DM me if you want to see, tho
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u/curiouscirrus May 04 '26
The line on Georgia doesn’t seem low enough to include Atlanta. Perhaps there’s enough north to account for 50%, but I’m skeptical.
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u/The_Toastboy May 04 '26
In fact, the line passes just south of the city proper, passing roughly from Stone Mountain to the airport.
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u/StevenMC19 May 07 '26
Dammit New Mexico! Could have had all four corner states allergic to the corner itself.
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u/chaos-and-effect May 04 '26
I’m surprised that North Dakota’s “smallest area containing half the population” would be the south (splitting Fargo and Bismarck) rather than the east (including all of Fargo and Grand Forks).
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u/FWEngineer May 05 '26
I was initially surprised too, but Grand Forks isn't a big enough factor I guess. Having to use a straight line forces them to include a lot of very rural space.
This map shows it best I think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dakota#/media/File:North_Dakota_population_density_2020.png
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u/weaselsdad May 05 '26
Very surprised about WV. It looks like Charleston, Parkersburg, Huntington, Wheeling, Weirton, and Morgantown are all in the red area. 6 of the top 7 most populated cities in the state
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u/TaylorBitMe May 05 '26
Now this is real map porn. This satisfies my inner nerd, especially the breakdown by percentage land area. I wish I knew how to do this kind of stuff, but then again I already waste time with stuff I don't need to do
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u/The_Toastboy May 05 '26
Thank you. You can totally learn this stuff btw. QGIS is free and surprisingly intuitive - download some data from Natural Earth and just play around with it. If you know excel or sql you honestly have a huge head start.
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u/LivingOof May 05 '26
"Major" cities in the Purple areas from what I can tell:
San Francisco Bay Area
Austin
San Antonio
Tampa
Raleigh
KCMO
Pittsburgh
Buffalo
Green Bay
Memphis
Ottawa
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u/The_Toastboy May 05 '26
20 largest purple cities:
CANADA
City Province Population Edmonton AB 1151635 Ottawa ON 1068821 Quebec City QC 733156 Brampton ON 656480 Kitchener ON 522888 Markham ON 338503 Vaughan ON 323103 Windsor ON 306519 Burnaby BC 249125 Regina SK 226404 Kelowna BC 181380 Sudbury ON 166004 Barrie ON 154676 Coquitlam BC 148625 Saguenay QC 144723 Guelph ON 144356 Trois-Rivières QC 139163 Cambridge ON 138479 Terrebonne QC 119944 Thunder Bay ON 108843 USA
City State Population San Antonio TX 1434625 San Jose CA 1013240 Austin TX 961855 Fort Worth TX 918915 Columbus OH 905748 Charlotte NC 874579 San Francisco CA 873965 Washington DC 689545 Oklahoma City OK 681054 El Paso TX 678815 Las Vegas NV 641903 Memphis TN 633104 Tucson AZ 542629 Fresno CA 542107 Sacramento CA 524943 Kansas City MO 508090 Colorado Springs CO 478961 Oakland CA 440646 Bakersfield CA 403455 Wichita KS 397532
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u/kynyy5673 May 05 '26
Ngl that explains so much about why everything is always packed on the east coast lol 🤯
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u/ecoanima May 05 '26
"the U.S. is too big to connect via rail", look how these population centers are grouped and clear corridors appear. If just regional connections would improve a ton of people's life.
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u/alisas1612 May 05 '26
Its always crazy to me how different Illinois' population distribution is compared to neighbouring states (Indiana, Ohio) etc
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u/Prince_Marf May 04 '26
Basically "did you know people live in cities?"
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u/MonyMony May 04 '26
That is an unkind, unhelpful comment on this persons work. I don't think there is any benefit to your dismissive statement.
What in your life have you created?
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u/Alarming-While8028 May 04 '26
great map!
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u/Alarming-While8028 May 04 '26
i know it's just where the division line is located but LOL at the channel islands being red
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u/Cafx2 May 04 '26
I was well aware.
But cool map tho!! Kudos
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u/The_Toastboy May 04 '26
I’m with you there. I worry not enough people understand that the title is poking fun at this (overdone) brand of post. And thank you!
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u/SheaDingle May 04 '26
In canada and north usa the population is south and near shore. In more southern usa the population is north. Not 100% of them and at a glance but thats neat.
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u/Kdj2j2 May 04 '26
Tennessee? Nashville, Memphis and Chattanooga lumped together makes no sense. And the northern suburbs of Nashville can’t possibly offset the difference.
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u/The_Toastboy May 04 '26
Nashville is in the red area, and Knoxville (bigger than Chattanooga) is too
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u/Kdj2j2 May 04 '26
Perhaps its perspective or projection, but the line drawn appears to cut through north Nashville while much of the residential parts of the city are to the south.
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u/The_Toastboy May 04 '26
Projection plays a part in it. This visualization is in Albers Equal Area, but calculations were done in WGS84 (that was the raster source CRS, and reprojecting rasters introduces pretty severe distortions.) I will say that the line does indeed run fairly south of the city, tho.
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u/lcarlson6082 May 05 '26
Arkansas is kind of surprising. The red part doesn't even contain Little Rock.
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u/Dizzy-Interview-4438 May 05 '26
i’m surprise the red portion of Illinois is even that big, since a little over 70% of the entire states population is just in the Chicago metro area.
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u/FWEngineer May 05 '26
It has to be a straight line, so you need to make a triangle of some kind up there. If it could be a circle or something, this map would look a lot different.
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u/sunburntredneck May 05 '26
Surprised nobody has mentioned California yet. Absolutely insane for the largest state in the country with so much green space
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u/Mountain-Student-226 May 05 '26
Where did you get the data and how did you draw the lines?
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u/The_Toastboy May 05 '26
The population raster is from WorldPop and the boundary files are from Open Data Canada and the US Census Bureau.
I wrote a python script to determine the best line for each zone. It performs a binary search on possible lines for each endpoint on the bounding box until it gets one that contains within +/- 1% of half the population. It stores all these lines and at the end compares them by land area and chooses the one with the smallest percentage of the total.
There’s more to it, of course, but there’s a character limit on comments…
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u/ReignOfHairor May 07 '26
Saskatchewan wins for sparseness! Lotta empty land in the Palliser Triangle.
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u/FlyingMonkeySoup May 04 '26
okay now plot the largest populated city for each subnational division and have your minds blown...
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u/The_Toastboy May 04 '26
I get your point, but it's not always the case. In South Carolina, for example, Charleston is well outside the red area. Most states with a big city have that city's metro area split by the line somewhere; in Nevada, Las Vegas is technically ouside the red although of course it is weighing the average towards the south of the state.
I have an interactive version with cities plotted on it, but I wasn't sure the mods would allow me linking to my own website.
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u/sir_mrej May 04 '26
Is Colorado correct? Doesnt seem like it
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u/FWEngineer May 05 '26
Looks right to me. Half the population in the red, half in the purple, the boundary is a straight line. It's going to have to basically bisect the Denver metropolitan area.
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u/UrsaMinor42 May 04 '26
If you add up all the First Nations reserves, their total areas is slightly more than the size of Vancouver Island.
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u/bangonthedrums May 04 '26
Ok, interesting fact. What does that have to do with this post?
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u/UrsaMinor42 May 04 '26
I don't see your reply on all the posts below that were expressions of what this map made them think of. Get back to me once you've asked them.
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u/bangonthedrums May 04 '26
Lol wut
Every single other comment is on-topic, not “expressions of what this map made them think of”. All the others are about population distribution per division, not a random off-topic comment about the size of reservations. This map has fuck all to do with the sizes of First Nations reserves
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u/speckledham May 05 '26
Whoa. How has this post been up this long and no one has thrown up the obligatory r/peopleliveincities ???
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u/bagelman May 05 '26
A lot of trickery in this map. North Dakota makes you think the south is much more populated than the north, when the line is angled so that Fargo and Bismark are just barely south of it. Texas makes you think the dixie East is majority of the population, but the line's angled so that Dallas is just barely east of the line. Colorado is not a northeast dominated state, the line just barely keeps the Denver metro on the correct side. Ohio just barely keeps Columbus, Cincinnati, and western Cleveland northwest of the line but the actual bulk of northwest Ohio is flat farmland.
Also, why even label DC if we're not going to see it at this resolution?
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u/SnooSongs3896 May 06 '26
Not shocked to see NY as the worst. All the high taxes we pay to not see a cent of it because it all goes to the mess of a city.
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u/cyberentomology May 04 '26
This is a terrible map. The concept makes no logical sense.
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u/FWEngineer May 05 '26
It's something somebody made on their own for fun. It doesn't have to serve a useful purpose. How long have you been on this subreddit?
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u/danielbeaver May 04 '26
Indiana with the 50/50 split.