Thought this would be interesting to some of you.

A New Index to Measure Sprawl Gives High Marks to Los Angeles - CityLab (http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/02/a-new-index-to-measure-sprawl-gives-high-marks-to-los-angeles/385559/)

If you want to see bad sprawl, check out Mexico City. That is freaking crazy!

Most of the City of L.A. is very dense. It's the suburbs that are sprawled and a good reason for much of the spreading out has to do with topography. There are lots of hills and mountains surrounding the city which are either protected or unbuildable.

Here is the sprawl rankings. Not surprisingly, OKC ranks very poorly, although both Dallas and Ft. Worth are worse and Houston only slightly better.


http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/02/Screen_Shot_2015_02_17_at_10.13.22_AM/53fdab847.png

http://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/sprawlmeter.jpg

Full table of rankings (http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/documents/chart.pdf)

If you want to see bad sprawl, check out Mexico City. That is freaking crazy!

You think that's bad, you should see Spatula City.


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If you want to see bad sprawl, check out Mexico City. That is freaking crazy!

I've never been to Mexico City and I've honestly never spent much time "researching" it (Google certified), but I remember reading somewhere that it suffers from a similar topography problem that the Los Angeles metro area suffers from as well.

Mexico city covers a lot ground space but it's not what I would call sprawl. Mexico City has 21 million people in a dry lake bed that is only about 30 miles across. That is the equivalent of squeezing the population of Texas into a circle 15 miles around the Cox Center. Sprawl to me is more about land use practices, lot size, transportation networks, and giant parking lots.

If I had to come up with a way to measure sprawl it would be a 4-way intersection per sq mile and cul-de-sac index. Less than 50 4-way intersections or more than 4 cul-de-sacs per sq mile is sprawl.

Mexico city covers a lot ground space but it's not what I would call sprawl. Mexico City has 21 million people in a dry lake bed that is only about 30 miles across. That is the equivalent of squeezing the population of Texas into a circle 15 miles around the Cox Center. Sprawl to me is more about land use practices, lot size, transportation networks, and giant parking lots.

If I had to come up with a way to measure sprawl it would be a 4-way intersection per sq mile and cul-de-sac index. Less than 50 4-way intersections or more than 4 cul-de-sacs per sq mile is sprawl.

I was going to post something similar. You said it very well. It's the largest city, population wise, in North America. The Federal District does, in fact, have a population of 21,000,000.