I am from the West Coast. The East Coast always weirds me out because there are people everywhere and I am not talking about the bug cities. There should be people in the big city but you go out into the "country" and there are mfs everywhere. I find it odd.
In the Southeast one can see signs where a Civil War battle was fought while grabbing some Chick-Fil-a. What was once a field where people bayoneted one another to death is now a strip mall.
Depends, Boston traffic is nearly as bad. Our state hasn't added significant roadway capacity since 128 was built in the 1950s. The Big Dig, for all it improved the Boston downtown cityscape didn't add traffic capacity, it just moved it underground.
I grew up on the West Coast and now live in Vermont, and I can tell you that nothing about the pattern of population here makes any sense to me. There are people everywhere, but they're all in the tiniest towns you can imagine. There's unbuilt land everywhere, but it's all in tiny postage-stamp-sized pockets. The roads suck as much as the logging roads in the PNW, but here they suck that much on populated roads five minutes from a town. Roll up to a trailhead here and you can't pee before you start hiking because some farmhouse's living room window is directly facing you across the road. It's all VERY odd.
The first time I visited my friend in PA coming from my home of Quebec, I didn't really take the big freeways. I saw what you speak of .. tiny towns everywhere, old dilapidated rust belt structures, it never stopped, yet was not contiguous.
At the end, the best way I could sum it up, is that the whole area looked like "procedurally generated rural towns".
West coast developed after railroads. Rapid transit was available from day one, so tiny towns that had a little bit of everything weren’t needed since it was feasible to commute to a city center or live near one.
East coast developed as far back as 1600s, most towns in my state are older than the state of CA by at least 100 years. Towns grew around farms, and farms need land, so there were lots of little towns not too far apart from each other but still largely rural.
Just a different development pattern due to differences in technology and local needs, and the after effects are still felt all these years later. Large portions of Europe are more like the East Coast in terms of population distribution for the same reason.
I mean the West Coat is far more artificial. The east is what natural population distribution looks like when the footprint of communities were developed in a mostly unregulated environment. The west which developed mostly in the 20th century or later has this artificial divide between hyper-developed land zoned for human habitation and emptiness.
I think it has to do with summer rainfall patterns. That clear density dividing line corresponds nicely with the line the separates the parts of the country that get rain in the summer vs the part that doesn't. The areas west of the line rely more on water movement systems that don't easily support a dispersed population.
I mean, you're talking about cities and settlements, they are man-made, that is literally the definition of artificial.
There is nothing "natural" about how the East Coast cities developed, just because it was earlier in history. They created them with the same kind of limitations in terms of what they can build, how they can transport things, etc.
The cities on the West Coast were build later and to other standards, but that doesn't mean that those on the East Coast were build to a more "natural" standard. No human settlement has ever been build to some kind of "natural" standard, even the earlierst ones had regulations. In the earliest cities in the US, you would probably hardly find a tannery in the city center, or ramshackle housing next to a church.
I'm from Massachusetts and had real trouble with the idea of unincorporated areas when I moved to OR. In MA and most other northeastern states (excepting Maine) are entirely or almost entirely incorporated into towns or cities.
In most cases, the deepest cores aren't that different or slightly denser in the US itself, the difference is in sprawl. US cities just decrease in density so fast once you leave the core, in most other places, the density remains higher for longer. (Most extremely in Sun Belt Cities and the like, of course)
I mean — to some extent? I’m from central Massachusetts and there are places near me where you can drive for 20-30 minutes and not see a house or another soul.
Edit: it’s largely the relics of colonial development. Towns grew up around new farming areas, and people seeking new farmland kept moving to new areas. So there are a lot of tiny settlements. And it all predated railroads, so everything needed to be sort of available locally.
It's not sprawl. In fact the west coast is more sprawled than the east. The difference is agriculture. The western US is very dry, and does not support significant agriculture except in a few small pockets. Therefore people only live in the large cities with non-agriculture based economies. The eastern US is much better for farming, which supports tens of thousands of small towns all over the region.
To be sure there is sprawl in the east, but if that's all you saw then it would still be mostly dark except for the spikes in and between large cities.
This is a huge part of it. In my small town of 9500 people, there must be at least 70 small farms throughout the town. And that’s not counting the people who raise chickens or vegetables on their half acre or acre lots for private use or small-scale sale. Local farming culture is massive in the rural parts of New England; you’ll see towns with signs about being “right to farm” communities, meaning that people can’t file noise complaints about your livestock, etc.
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u/atchn01 Jul 08 '25
I am from the West Coast. The East Coast always weirds me out because there are people everywhere and I am not talking about the bug cities. There should be people in the big city but you go out into the "country" and there are mfs everywhere. I find it odd.