Is it true that one quarter of the area of Los Angeles is covered in cars?

Is it true that one quarter of the area of Los Angeles is covered in cars?

Nope. This myth is fairly widespread on the internet, but it’s not accurate. As of 2007, there were 5,484,606 registered automobiles in the city of Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, the city itself spans an area of 502.693 square miles.

To cover one quarter of the city, the city’s five and a half million cars would need to take up an area of 125.67325 square miles or 3.5 BILLION square feet. That’s not even close to being true.

To be generous, let’s assume that the 5,484,606 automobiles registered in Los Angeles are all above average in size.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that everyone in LA drives a Hummer H1.The Hummer H1 has a width of 86.5 inches and a length of 184.5 inches.

That’s a grand total of 15,959.25 square inches (about 110.8 square feet) of area covered by each automobile.

That would mean that the total area covered by LA’s cars would be 607,694,345 square feet (about 22 square miles).

That’s a far cry from the 3.5 BILLION square feet required to cover 25% of Los Angeles. It’s actually less than 5%. It’s probably smaller still, since most cars take up less area than the Hummer H1.

Still, LA does have a lot of cars. There are 3,792,621 people in the city, which means that there are almost twice as many cars as there are people.

(Sources: 1, 2, 3)

3d wooden brain teasers for you to try via OMG Facts http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/omg-facts/WpAq/~3/2TzZFS2Sy10/44478

3d wooden brain teasers for you to try from Net Sauce http://netsauce.blogspot.com/2013/12/is-it-true-that-one-quarter-of-area-of.html