Los Angeles is big. Like, you know, really big.
The L.A. city limits contain a land area of 469 square miles, with a population of some 3.8 million people at a density of over 27,000 people per square mile.
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But to understand the true scale of those numbers sometimes you need to do a little comparison. This is where the below maps come in.
The self-storage website SpareFoot.com used a tool that leveraged Google Maps to draw a city-limit outline of L.A. and then projected that outline on other city / state / landmark maps, recalculating the outline’s dimensions using Mercator projection distortions. In short, they took an overlay of Los Angeles and pasted it on a bunch of different world cities to illustrate exactly how big the city of angels really is.
It’s important to note, however, that Sparefoot chose to use L.A.’s city limits rather than draw out the entire metropolitan area (mostly for sake of simplicity). As many of readers will understand, when angelenos think of Los Angeles, many of our interpretations extend to a much larger scope.
In fact L.A. county, with its roughly 10 million total inhabitants, is the largest county by-population in the entire country. And if you look at the land area of the entire county, now we’re talking about something along the lines of 4,700 square miles of land, ranging from Lancaster at the northern tip to the edges of Long Beach in the southern portion.
Still, a fun and informative comparison below.
Enjoy the maps!
[h/t Reddit]
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