If you live in a rural area… in the USA

Rural areas where I lived in Mexico are walkable/bikable and most people get to the city an hour or so away with a shuttle that goes back and forth to the village. Our rural model is different and better where all the people live close in a small town or village area that has all the stuff to do and grocery stores and the crop fields, ranches, and orchards spread out radially from there.

Higher gas prices in my area will just cause more homelessness. There are no alternatives to driving, people will lose their homes before they live without a car.

he is strange and makes me nervous. i’m not eating his breakfast tho

Crickey mate, put another undesirable on the barby?

You thought he’d be from Denmark like Hamlet?

Fun fact: there’s no universally-accepted definition of “continent!” Depending on how you define it there could be as many as 8 or as few as 4. Sometimes Africa, Europe, and Asia are counted as one continent, and sometimes Antarctica isn’t (notably in the Olympic flag). Sometimes Zealandia is added as the 8th continent. All the definitions I’ve seen count Australia as its own, though; and as noted that one’s missing.

All of that to say, the original commenter might have an Afro-Eurasian non-Antarctic model in mind when they say that one entire continent is missing. The second one might have a non-Antarctic six-continent model in mind, and you have the traditional (English-speaking) seven-continent model in mind. But you might very reasonably (well, okay, slightly reasonably) say that this infographic is missing four continents: Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and Zealandia.

I need to know how the penguins commute

It is, but read the small font: it says they excluded Mexico from their North America stats.

although wrong I think it would make more sense

Cape Town is 4% active, 82% car, according to their visualization

You’re right, this graph isn’t specifically about cities; it’s just that cities are currently the biggest transit problems in the US.

I would like to see a graph that just shows major metropolitan areas.

The org that did this research also has a visualizer tool where you can compare different cities around the world, and you can see that even new York City has something like 65% of its population using personal cars. And it’s by far the most multimodal city in North America; Ithaca gets close, because they have a robust cycling culture, and there are more Canadian cities in the hunt than US cities, but it’s still unbelievably skewed in favor of personal cars. Which means that, even if you excluded all rural areas from this graph, North America would still be dramatically anomalous.

you can’t include households that are many miles from any store at all and use that to skew the numbers.

I think that the reason that the graph doesn’t exclude rural areas from its data is that the density of North America isn’t dramatically different from the density of Europe or Asia. Yes, the US is slightly less dense than the world average, but not excessively so; and there are plenty of countries in those other continents with lower density than the US or Canada. In fact, Canada is quite a bit less dense than the US, but it’s pulling North America’s multimodality up. So no, you can’t use it to skew the numbers–but I mean that in the sense that you’re unable to do it, it’s impossible, because it’s affecting the numbers worldwide in more or less the same way.

Also, why exclude Mexico and then call it North america. Why not call it Canada and the US? Why not label Canada and the US separately?

Better readability, is my guess. The only divisions in this infographic that really matter are the political ones, because those are the divisions that affect the data in a meaningful way. So cutting out Mexico is no more arbitrary than cutting out Canada would’ve been.

These numbers are pushing an agenda.

All numbers are pushing an agenda.

Ok, not all numbers, but there’s no real reason to gather demographic research data otherwise. We do censuses and polls and studies to figure out what to do as a society. That’s why we do that. The numbers are telling a story, and it’s not a false story: multimodality in the United States and Canada is dramatically lower than in other countries around the world. Cities in North America don’t serve their citizens as well because their citizens don’t have as many options for how they get around.

Sure, they could use this data to highlight how multimodal transportation in Eastern Europe is, but that’s just another way of pointing out how one-sided it is in North America. Or you could use it to show how dominant public transit is in East Asia, or biking in South Asia, but again, they would just be another way of showing how anemic it is in the US.

And when you’re an organization called “Environment International,” that’s the story you’re trying to tell. They’re just slicing it up in a way that makes the story clearest.

I’m not saying the agenda is wrong but this graph seems a bit dishonest.

It’s not dishonest. It’s being pretty up-front about showing a huge disparity, and it’s not trying to hide the fact that they’re cutting out Mexico to show that there’s a serious problem in the US and Canada. It’s like if you took a photo of a purse-snatching in progress, and you cropped in to show the crime occurring. No one would accuse you of lying because you cropped out the kid getting a treat from the ice cream truck on the right-hand side of the frame; you just made it more clear what you were trying to show with that photograph.

Make the one map but on equal earth projection. Will finally fix the “the majority of countries” feeling which it gives.

If Mexico’s stats are much closer to the rest of Central America, then it makes much more sense to count it with them, so the outlier of North America is better seen.

Did you see how many comments the top level commenter put out?

I myself would favour to use:

• median net discretionary GDP (PPP) per capita
• generalised entropy index
• Social Progress Index

The first one yields that 50% of the population can buy more or less than a certain amount of stuff, after tax and regular expenses.

The second could be used for wealth disparity. Unlike the Gini index, it allows you to view differences by groups.

The third is very broad and does not use economics, instead focusing on general wellbeing. Some criticism I have on the index though, is that on regards of inclusivity, it doesn’t include the (very good) Asher Fergusson index for trans rights. LGBTQ+ isn’t just gays and lesbians, it’s all queer people.

I’d also add in the Copenhagenisation index for bicycling, alongside with indices for pedestrian and public transit-friendliness.

For countries occupying other areas, count those areas both separately and include them in that country’s statistics. So then Israel’s statistics are actually honest: the inequality is extremely high, life expectancy very low, and so on.

To top it off, within the safety part of the social progress index, I’d include the detained population as a rate of the total, perceptions of state (and hybrid) violence, as well as extent of surveillance, police and para-military, armedness.

Oh, and it’d be better to have sources be independent from state and corporatist actors.

Yes of course. In reality, capitalists would take 40% of that GDP produced and the state another 20%. So you’d be left with 40% of the “value” you produced while eating shit.

IF you had a functional social safety net, however in this circumstance you would eat shit, pay taxes, a family in Palestine would die, and a rich person would have a couple extra dollars towards the next extravagant pedophilia convention in Florida