Sardines
June 29, 2017
Sardines is a simple web app that I wrote to compare the density of Birmingham, Alabama to other cities in the world. This app shows you where the citizens must reside if our density was similar to another city. For example, if Birmingham, which has a low density, had the same high density as Paris, then the entire population would have to squeeze into just a small part of downtown.
Looking at density is a valuable tool when trying to understand why certain services like public transportation or retail struggle. Low density cities lead to car dependency, duplication of services, and long travel times.
Examples
In this first screenshot, the current population for Birmingham, AL lives in the light gray area. If Birmingham had the same population density as Paris, France, then that same population would have to squeeze into the purple area. As you can see, the size of Birmingham city would by tiny with a higher density.
This second screenshot, shows a comparison with a less dense city: Dallas, TX.
Play
You can play Sardines:
Source Code
I have written Sardines as a pure javascript app using the React framework. It is completely serverless, except for the static assets.