It doesn’t matter if it’s 3, 5, 10 or 100 kilometers: so many people live near you

I have a new favorite website. It’s from Tom Forth. Forth lives in Leeds and is a data nerd. He is CTO and co-founder of The Data City and leads the data team at Open Innovations in Leeds.

And then the Brit runs his own website. There he built a tool he calls “Population around a Point” and shows just that: inhabitants around a point on Earth.

You can set the radius from 3 to 100 kilometers, click on any point and after a few moments (or a little longer if your radius is larger) you will see how many people live in that area.

The data comes from the Global Human Settlement Layer, currently from 2015. The information from 2020 should be usable soon. A quick test shows that the data is not entirely accurate, but in Switzerland it certainly comes close. The comparison with the municipal boundaries is difficult because the areas logically have different shapes.

A funny extra feature is the information about the number of bus, tram and train stops, which Forth has taken over from Open Street Map. However, he writes that these (especially outside Europe) contain some errors.

Here you can “snoop around” and check your place of residence.