Someone on Reddit made the claim that one third of the US population lives within 500 miles of Toronto. How true/plausible is this claim?

34 comments

1. 500 miles is going to cover a fair amount of the northeast. The center of Toronto is 470 miles from Manhattan, but Florida, Texas, and California are pretty far. I think 110 million is a bit much.

2. I’m sure that’s enough to cover cities like Chicago, New York, Boston, and Washington DC so it’s very likely. Basically any American that lives in the Northeast/North-midwest.

3. I think they meant Canadians and from the Canadian border.

4. It seems to be correct, as it would include at minimum all or nearly all of NY, PA, NJ, MD, OH, IN, MI, WI, DC, IL, VA, NH, CT and VT. It might be closer to a quarter than a third; my rough calculation is about 95 million people, not 112 million.

   It’s a geographic quirk of Southern Ontario being located between the Midwest and NY/New England.

5. Plausible, but likely falls just short. That range includes all of New England, New York, NYC, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and the Chicagoland area.

   14.85 million live in New England

   19.45 million live in New York

   12.8 in Pennsylvania

   11.69 in Ohio

   9.99 in Michigan

   5.8 in Wisconsin

   Chicagoland alone is 9.45 million

   This doesn’t include any of Minnesota, or the rest of Indiana and Illinois within this distance, or parts of New Jersey, West Virginia and Kentucky undoubtedly in this range (Louisville is still within 500 miles).

   I added up to 83.94 million. US population is 329.5 million. One third would be 109.8 million. I don’t think there are enough people in the range to make up the difference, but it would likely be pretty close.

   So I guess the answer is yes and no. It’s probably *around* a third of America, but not quite there.

   Edit: because maps are deceiving due to the earth being round, apparently NJ, MD, and parts of Virginia are included. That makes it much more likely to be over 1/3.

6. Yeah I’d believe that. It’s a pretty big circle that encompasses pretty much the entire Northeast and its major cities and dense suburban areas. Plus Chicago, high population states in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, and Indianapolis.

   https://www.mapsdirections.info/en/measure-map-radius/?lat=43.84740337301925&lng=-79.32128906250001&radius=812506.5926033566

7. [Sounds about right](https://i.imgur.com/bbkQ3m7.png)

8. Without digging in to the numbers, that seems pretty plausible. The Northeast Corner of the US is the most densely populated area of our country and has some of our oldest and biggest cities.

9. It’s believable. [This](https://i.imgur.com/UEBYN2w.png) is what that circle looks like. You can get to 1/3 of the US population by adding the entire populations of New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, Virginia, Massachusetts, Indiana, Maryland, and Wisconsin. Some of those states are only partially in the circle, but it looks like their biggest population centers are. There are also a few other states that are in the circle, but I didn’t need to count.

   So I can’t definitely confirm it without putting in more effort, but I’m satisfied that it’s plausible.

10. I have no idea.

    I wouldn’t agree or disagree until someone calculates the math. And I would just simply agree with the math.

11. It might be a little short but it’s plausible.

12. sounds about right, there’s a lot of population centers in the Northeast

13. I don’t know about a third, but I made a map and did the calculations and it looks like AT LEAST 27% of the population lives within 500 miles of Toronto. I only counted states whose FURTHEST border is within 500 miles, so once you count the other ones within 500 miles it might add up to a third.

14. [Here’s the map](https://www.mapdevelopers.com/draw-circle-tool.php?circles=%5B%5B804670%2C43.6534817%2C-79.3839347%2C%22%23AAAAAA%22%2C%22%23000000%22%2C0.4%5D%5D).

    That’s a huge chunk of our most populated areas. I suspect the claim is roughly accurate.

    It covers almost all of Virginia, the entire northeast, Chicago and most of the Midwest.

    Edit: doesn’t seem like the link is working, here’s a screenshot https://i.imgur.com/vbD33io.jpg

15. I thought it was flipped and a huge percentage of the Canadian population lived within 100-200 miles of the US border.

16. Very well could be… you’ve got New York City, Chicago, Washington DC, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Buffalo metro areas all within that radius

17. Honestly, I bet it clears 1/3 pretty easily.

18. I asked Google “how far am I from Toronto?”

    Answer: 478.0 miles

    I live in a suburb of Philadelphia

19. So do more than 60-70% of all Canadians.

    It’s where the first Western cities rose up, and is still by far the most densely populated area on the continent.

    Seems pretty believable to me.

20. There are 6 million in the Detroit metro area alone.

21. If I were at my office PC, I could fact-check this with GIS. But it’s plausible, given that the two largest metro areas are relatively close.

22. A 500 mile circle around Toronto includes:

    All of these states: New York (pop 20m) Pennsylvania (13m) Ohio (12m) New Jersey (9m) Maryland (6m) West Virginia (2m) DC (1m) Delaware (1m) Connecticut (4m) Rhode Island (1m) New Hampshire (1m) Vermont (1m) (total 71 million people)

    Most but not all of these states: Michigan (~10m within) Virginia (~8m within) Massachusetts (only parts of Nantucket Island are more than 500 miles away from Toronto)(7m within) Indiana (~6m within) (total 31 million people)

    These major metropolitan areas: Chicago IL (~10m) Milwaukee WI (~1.5m) Green Bay WI (~0.5m) Portland ME (~0.5m) Lexington KY (~0.5m) (total 13m)

    And a sparsely populated sliver of north Carolina and apparently the northeast most corner of Tennessee

    Altogether for a population of 115 million people out of a total US population of 331 million people means that at least 34.75% of the US population lives within 500 miles of Toronto

23. 500 miles is a long way.

24. Not implausible, since the Mean Center of the population is in Missouri currently, while the Median center is in Indiana.

25. That sounds about right. That covers the most densely populated region of the country. 80-100 mil is the right ballpark, which comes in around 1/4 to just under 1/3

26. Considering that covers about 1/3rd the US that’s possible

27. California, Texas, and Florida are the top three states by population, are more than 500 miles from Toronto, and amount for roughly 92 million people. Chicago and its metro area are over 500 miles away and account for another 9 million. The list goes on; so, I call hogwash.

28. Not something one can agree or disagree with, either it is true or it isn’t

29. Just checking google earth, very plausible

30. Fun fact related to this….the extreme NE tip of Tennessee is closer to Canada than to the extreme SW tip of Tennessee

31. Huh.

    And we were teasing the Kanucks for being mostly within 100 miles of us.

32. Cities.

33. Sounds right to me. I’m in Delaware, and 335 miles from Toronto.

34. >Would you agree or disagree, and why?

    What fun is that? No reason to take something verifiable and make it into an opinion. I wrote a quick script to do the math.

    For this, I grabbed a map of the [US counties](https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/esri::usa-counties) and a map of the [Toronto municipal boundary](https://open.toronto.ca/dataset/regional-municipal-boundary/). I buffered the boundary by a range of miles, and determined the minimum population by summing up the population of all the counties that are covered by the buffer, and the maximum population by summing up population the counties that intersect the buffer.

    It’s really close, 500 miles is between 21.2-24.8% (it includes New York, but not Boston, for instance). At 600 miles, it’s between 29.2-33.5% (when you add Boston and Chicago)! At 1000 miles, it’s 50.1-51.4%.

    See a chart and map at: [https://imgur.com/a/HPQJXoX](https://imgur.com/a/HPQJXoX)