The United States has a lot of people in it. However, we wanted to take a look at what was the most populous city within each state, and graph it out.
We took a look only at incorporated cities (as opposed to metropolitan areas) and found some interesting results, especially towards the bottom.
Familiar cities like Boise (ID) and Salt Lake City (UT) are outside the top 100, while cities like Portland (ME) and Cheyenne (WV) aren’t even in the top 500. Burlington, the most populous city in VT, didn’t even crack the top 1000.
Data was compiled from the Census (via Wikipedia 1 2) for cities with population over 100,000 and the World Gazetteer for the remaining Top 1000 cities.
Here’s a text file of the data.
We think taking a look at this in a bar chart gives real perspective on the differences from state-to-state.
I’d be interested in seeing the population of these cities relative to the population of the state? How do the two compare? I suppose I could do it myself, but this is why we have GraphGraph!
The most interesting part of this graph is the bottom. Wyoming is the least populous state in the Union, but Cheyenne is larger than Burlington, VT. Yes, Vermont is the second least populous state, but Wyoming is WAY bigger. The difference in population density between these two states almost merits a blog post on it’s own.
All of this is a long winded way of saying something we already know: There is a lot of empty space in Wyoming.
But at least it’s a rectangle.