Average Distances between Modern communities

Factual Questions
1

Rather than hijack the interesting thread Average Distance Between Medieval Communities? which got started just a little while ago, I’ll post what I wanted to say here in hopes others will enjoy the sidetrack.

Whenever I have spare time in the car, waiting for my wife to do some shopping while I wait, I’ll get out the atlas we keep in the car and try to brush up on my USA geography. I’ll even do it at home sometimes if the TV is rotten at the time and there’s not much new on The Dope.

And when we’re on the road it occurs to me that the larger towns in this part of the country are spaced out in roughly 50-mile distances. The cities in Tennessee (Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga, Knoxville and maybe a few others) tend toward a 100-150mile range, but the moderate sized communities like Jackson, Clarksville, Murfreesboro, Maryville, Cleveland, and dozens more their size (more or less) approach a 50-mile separation.

Once you get to the small town sizes, you’re going to run into another one of them in less than 20 miles as a rule.

Now. In the Northeast USA, it seems the big towns and cities are much closer together. And in the West and Northwest, unless you’re looking at California and Texas, things are much more spread out.

My thinking has been that “rural land” in The South has always been prized and necessary, so cramming a bunch of towns together would go against the better use of land. And even when the travel time to a community shopping area (General Store more like) had to be taken into account, it still was preferable not to mess up good farm land for the sake of whatever town or city life had to offer.

Is this thinking flawed? Are there more logical explanations for why town and city spacings are like they are?

Does you part of the country (even those of you outside the USA) have a better reason for the spacing of communities? How close are towns to each other where you live?

2

One huge problem with this question is that our city centers are poorly defined. It is very difficult to define the distance between city X and city Y because the edges blur and there may be more than one “center” in the same town.

To take the Dallas, TX for example, the area is just one huge city sprawling 50 miles or more between Dallas, Fort Worth, Irving, Arlington, Plano and others. There is no clear border. Before the modern area, there still would not have been a clear way to determine the distance between them except for arbitrary political boundaries.

My home town in Northwestern Louisiana was once a railroad stop with a tiny but well-defined main street. However, there were other communities within a day’s horse ride in all directions. The problem is that the town center may have been just a single store with the actual activity being on farms fanning out in all directions. That still exits to some degree to this day.

3

The problem with this reasoning is that, as you noted, towns in the NE are generally the most closely spaced in North America, and that is also the area with the most prized and productive rural land.

Spacing of towns is usually dictated by the productivity of the land, productive land supported a lot of small farms and farming families. Lots of farms and lots of families required lots of towns to service them. In contrast in less productive areas each family farm needed to cover a lot of area, with only the single Cartwright family and a handful of hired hands suported by the massive Ponderosa farm. In those sorts of situations you simply can’t support even a general store and a saloon town in high denisties. As a result towns become spread out more and more as rural population densities decline, and rural population densities decline as land productivity declines.

At its most extreme you can look at much of Australia, where hamlets are usually about 100 kilometres apart and major towns are about 400 km apart. That’s not because the land is so prized as you suggested, but rather because the land is so valueless and so low in productivity. A 100km radius is required to sustain even a small township, and large towns can only survive when they draw in capital and customers from many hundreds of kilometres around.

4

My favorite example is BosWash.

5

For more, look up “Central Place Theory”, developed by European geographers about sixty years ago.

6

I’ve lived in Florida most of my life, mostly in rural communities. It has always seemed to me that about every 10-15 miles there is a town.

I’ve often heard that the reasoning for this was because it’s about how far you could go there on a horse in a single day. I guess it’s the “I need to sleep” theory.

http://www.google.com/maps?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&tab=wl&q=
My example: Gainesville, Florida, at about a 10 mile radius is: Archer, Newberry, Alachua, Waldo, Hawthorne, Micanopy. Going from Gainesville towards Archer then to Bronson (about 10) then to Otter Creek (about 10) then to Rosewood (about 10, but mostly dead now) then to Cedar Key (about 10)

Go North from Otter Creek, you see the same pattern. Otter Creek, Chiefland, Fannin’ Springs, Old Town, Cross City.

These are small towns that really are just now getting seriously impacted by urban sprawl and to me, good examples of how towns started before the interstate system made 'em pop up at every exit.

It’s my theory and I’m stickin’ to it. :slight_smile:

7

Good point. The “large town” I’m most familiar with is Nashville. The names of sections of town, as best I can tell, are the names of what used to be separate communities, on the order of villages or even towns. New subdivisions are often named something quaint to suggest a continuation of that tradition. But places like Oak Hill, Berry Hill, Madison, Goodlettsville, Belle Meade, and bunches more, are in fact incorporated communities within the city limits of Nashville-Davidson County, which became Metro Nashville in the early 60’s. The map shows it all as one big glob, but the older maps, from maybe a century ago, show a fair amount of “rural land” separating what’s now all one city.

Atlanta probably outstrips Nashville and other Southern cities even more in this regard. And the “Boswash” phenomenon is at play here, too. It used to be that driving between Nashville and Murfreesboro involved a decent amount of farmland and otherwise undeveloped countryside. Now you can hardly tell where the boundaries of the towns/cities are.

Ignoring the special cases of the bigger cities that are swallowing up communities, old and new, as they sprawl, the South still has a goodly amount of “rural land” separating towns and villages.

8

In West Texas, where I grew up, towns were about 30 miles apart.

9

In Minnesota, outside the Twin Cities, the largest town in each county tends to be the county seat. In the area I’m in, the counties tend to be about 20 miles x 20 miles. Not surprisingly, the larger towns tend to be about 20 miles apart.

Minnesota population density map.

Iowa looks very similar

10

In the Canadian prairies a century or so ago, stops on the railways were spaced about eight miles apart so farmers could easily deliver their wheat to the elevators for pickup. There are still quite a few small towns at that spacing, even though grain handling is a lot more centralized. Larger places now are at least fifty miles apart.

11

One issue is that towns too close together get absorbed by larger communities. Where I used to live, near Princeton, there were road signs for towns that no longer existed excet as intersections. One example is Marshall’s Corner, between Pennington and Hopwell Borough, former home of the guy who discovered gold in California.

I’m sure geography had something to do with it also. When I lived in Southwestern Louisiana, towns around Lafayette used to be fairly isolated, before roads were built thanks to the discovery of oil. People living 15 miles apart had quite distinct French accents.

As another example, the city I lived in today used to be five, but unified 50 years ago. As cities bump into one another, I suppose there is pressure to merge and gain advantages of size. Brooklyn used to be a separate city also.

12

A friend who grew up in rural upstate New York once told me how funny she found New Jersey when she first moved there. She was used to a town, then some open space - woods, fields, etc., then some miles late, another town. In NJ, she’d be driving through one town, and then - whoops! - she’s in another town, and -whoops again!- yet a third! Apparently it took her a while to get over this.
Thinking about it, growing up in central NJ, I’m used to referring to where my aunt lives as ‘several towns over’, as though that’s an understood way of measuring things. Nobody seems to have a problem interpreting that, at least locally

13

And before that, it was a bunch of independent towns.

14

This BosWash concept is a little deceptive, IMHO. I live right smack in the middle of this corridor, in a small town in Connecticut, but my house is in a decidedly rural area. I live on a one acre lot with well water and septic. There are tens of thousands of acres of woods around me. My commute home from the Hartford area consists of 10 minutes of urban driving followed by 20 minutes of woods on both sides of the highway.

I’m only 15 miles away and 25 miles away from the two nearest cities to me, but there are definitely some rural areas in the BosWash “megalopolis.”

There are other towns in northeastern and northwestern Connecticut, also in the BosWash corridor, that are even more rural than my town. Some of them are an hour or more from the nearest city.

I’m originally from Houston, Texas, and I always had the impression that the northeast was indeed one continuous urban area from Boston to Washington, D.C. When I moved up here, I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were still large rural areas within the supposed BosWash megalopolis. For that reason, I think the concept is somewhat misleading.

15

Towns in the Northeast are close together because they were founded in an era of small 18th-century family farms. It took a tremendous amount of effort to start a farm in New England because so much effort was expended getting the glacially-deposited stones out of the fields without the benefit of mechanized equipment. This tended to keep the farms relatively small.

In addition, the land in New England is generally very hilly, with a lot of bedrock “ledge” outcrops. Finally, while there is ample rainfall, the weather is much cooler than other parts of the country.

For these reasons, most of the farming that had been undertaken in New England shifted west, ultimately reaching the central midwestern states like Nebraska and Kansas. I’m surprised that you would describe the northeastern U.S. as “the area with the most prized and productive rural land.”

Most of the 18th and 19th-century New England farms are gone, and have reverted back to woods. More of Connecticut is reportedly wooded today than was the case for the last two centuries. Only in the last decade or so has this trend started to reverse with the sprawl of housing development.

16

Where I am in Central VA is 20 minutes from 3 small towns and 40 minutes from 2 small cities.