this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
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The amount of people in a populated area is beyond comprehension. You can look at the numbers, but being aware of how many people there actually are is a rare epiphany. I was driving in rush hour traffic a few days ago and had a touch of it - I could see the line of lights both ways stretching out for a few miles and realized that I was but one in this sea of people, and it was but an instant of an hours-long flow of cars.
A marina full of boats isn't that many compared to lanes of stopped cars for miles.
On family road trips when I was a kid, I remember looking at the flow of cars in the opposing lanes, and thinking about just how many people there were in the world: We'd pass another car every second or so with at least one person in it, for hours and hours. It was a never-ending parade of humanity, and with only a handful of exceptions, people I would never, ever see again. The mind can't grasp those kinds of numbers.
And I'm old, so there are, like, almost twice as many people now.
Traffic is always one of the things that boggles me, because even for how many people there are on the road at that precise moment, it still doesn't even come close to the amount of people in the area.
To explain my thought: If everyone is traveling 60 mph, and there are four lanes, and everyone is riding each other's asses by being one second apart, that's still only 240 cars per minute passing a particular spot. That means in an hour of relatively rough traffic that is somehow smoothly flowing, only 14,400 cars are going to pass that spot in an hour.
I live in a large metropolitan area, so there are ~8-10 large highways leading towards the metro's center (that's 4-5 highways, but counting them twice for each one's inflow). Most of them vary in lane number as they come inwards, ballooning from 2 in the rural areas to 4-8 in the urban areas (though the areas with more than 4 are really only where highways are merging, so I think 4 is a good number to say as the highway's 'average'). So we can multiply that 14,400 number by 10 and get 144,000 cars moving into a city's center in the span of an hour. That still doesn't get anywhere near the millions of people living in the metroplex. Hopefully that means most people are living relatively close to their work, and all are living close to their play/chore destinations.
It really makes me ponder how much a certain element of the population has shaped our views, considering the amount of people who do the whole 'commuting' thing must be relatively small, yet that is such a giant complaint I hear about all the time.