How many people live in the English green belt?

Over a decade ago I set out to understand exactly where England's green belt land was by getting my hands on the raw data. Eventually it became open data and there's an update every year, along with loads of stats. At the time of writing, the proportion of land in England designated as green belt* was 12.6% of the total. But nobody lives in the green belt, right? Or at least hardly anyone, right? Or at least not that many, right? If you search online you won't find an answer to this question so that's why I've been looking at it on and off for a few years and now I have what I think is a good approximation of the total number of people who live in green belt land in England - 1.2 million or, to put it another way, more than in any single English local authority area (Birmingham has about 1.1 million people). That's 2.1% of the population of England.

I believe this estimate is pretty accurate

Are you sure?

How can I be sure that this number is correct, after all we don't actually have population data that fits the boundaries of the green belt. For example, you can't just add up Census Output Area populations within the green belt because they do not nest neatly (at all) within the green belt and if you try this approach you will get a wildly wrong figure. That's why I used the OS Open UPRN dataset from Ordnance Survey because this allows you to identify individual properties. There's also AddressBase Plus but a) that costs a lot of money and b) we'll get to that later. So, because I used address-level data I am confident that my figure of 1.2 million people living in the green belt is pretty accurate but you will see some independent verification below too. Update: read on for more but my 1.2 million people in the green belt figure compares very favourably to the 1.15 million figure calculated using the 'ONS average occupancy count for "in use" properties (by OA)' stats in the spreadsheet from Drew.

The dots are UPRNs in buildings, green = green belt

York's green belt is very much like a big green donut

My methodology, for anyone who is interested

How did I go about this? Well it went a bit like this...

• Get the latest green belt boundary file from DLUHC
• Get Open UPRN data from Ordnance Survey
• Get building footprint data from OS Zoomstack
• Add all data to QGIS
• Extract only those UPRNs (UPRNs are the authoritative identifier used to uniquely identify addressable locations in Great Britain) that fall within a building footprint, so that you're not including non-buildings etc
• Identify how many of these UPRNs within buildings fall within the green belt (I got about 34 million UPRNs in buildings out of 40 million total, and 593,273 were in buildings in the green belt in England)
• Then we do a comparison between the population of each English local authority area and each of the following: number of building objects from the OS Zoomstack dataset, total area covered by buildings, total count of UPRNs in buildings
• Then we bust out Occam's Razor to do a few simple scatterplots - compare each of the above to the population - to cut a long story short, you multiply my UPRN number by about 2 to get a total population

Building area vs population: a bit messy

Building object count vs population: too messy

UPRNs in buildings vs population: quite neat

• So once I saw a fairly linear relationship between my 'UPRNs in buildings' count and the total population of each local authority district in England I decided to use this to estimate population
• Not all local authority areas have green belt though, only 180 of just under 300 do
• For those areas with green belt the relationship between 'UPRNs in buildings' and the population was even stronger so that's why I have a good degree of confidence that we can multiply by 2 here to get a decent population estimate

UPRNs in buildings in green belt vs total population

• This all leads me to a population estimate for the English green belt of: 1,186,546 - but this is too precise so I'm just saying 1.2 million. 

Verification?

I did all these calculations myself and got a figure that seems pretty reasonable based on the methodology described above. It also feels about right - 2.1% of the population of England on 12.6% of the land area. The 2x multiplier for UPRNs in buildings to get population holds pretty much all across England as we can see from the charts above, and the relationship is even stronger when we look only at those areas that contain some green belt land.

If you check out an earlier post of mine on Twitter you'll see some other numbers which back me up, calculated using the very expensive and not-open AddressBase Plus dataset. I will add these below for reference. 

Here are some screenshots of calculations that use AddressBase Plus, including some populations for the different bits of green belt in England. Thanks of course to Drew for these numbers derived from AddressBase Plus - here's more on his methodology.

ABP is AddressBase Plus - similar figure to what I got

Estimates for the different bits of English green belt

A spreadsheet you can explore and have fun with

If you look at the spreadsheet shown above you will see three different estimates for the population of the green belt in England, ranging from 1,073,863 to 1,236,452. My figure of 1,186,546 is very close to the middle figure in the spreadsheet of 1,168,301 which was calculated from the ONS population estimate of 2.4 people per dwelling. You will also notice a tab in the spreadsheet with green belt population by local planning authority.

The dots are UPRNs, the shapes are buildings

So there we go. Why am I writing about this again? It's a long-standing interest of mine, plus it has also been in the news recently so I thought I'd take another look at it. Oh, also, I discovered that I'm only 430 metres from the green belt even though I'm in a very densely populated area.

Want to look at a map that has current green belt boundaries on it? Check out the National Map of Planning Data for England and then just turn on the green belt layer.

Green belt near me, I didn't realise so close

*'green belt' is how I'm writing it here but the government tend to use 'Green Belt' but of course if you're being proper you might say 'green belts' but we also see 'greenbelt' and 'Green belt' - I'm not fussed, it's all talking about the same thing

Intra-interstate populations

Another road-themed piece today, this time looking at US Interstates, and how many people live in between them. Why? Curiosity, plus it's a nice little data challenge using Census block population data from 2020. First off, let's start with the Beltway around Washington, D.C. - using 2020 Census data I get a total population of just under 2 million people (1,961,212), as you can see below.

Web map of the whole US is here

This is what the web map looks like.

Click an area to get the population

I loaded up a MapTiler streets backdrop layer in QGIS, created polygons from the the US national road network file from the Department of Transportation website (this required a lot of error checking/fixing) and then summed the population of all areas bounded by Interstates - including those in Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico.

Some numbers to begin with:

• 82 million people live entirely unbounded by Interstates (25% of the total - in the big red area in the map below).
• 10.4 million people live in the most populous 'bounded by Interstates' area.
• The next most populous bounded area has 5.6 million people in it (it's in Florida, see below).
• There are 83 'bounded by Interstates' areas with more than 1 million people.
• I get 443 populated bounded areas plus one 'at large' area, unbounded by Interstates.
• There are bounded areas in Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico as well as in the lower 48 states - see the web map for those.
• A few areas have fewer than 100 people in them - a couple of these seem to be statistical quirks (e.g. mismatched boundaries) but many are real, including this bounded triangle in Chicago.

Such vital research

Okay, show me the maps

Here you go, some major metro maps below. You can zoom, pan, click as much as you want on the web map, but here are zoomed maps for some of the largest metro areas across the United States. Sometimes with terrain, sometimes not.

Los Angeles

New York

Chicago

Central Florida (second highest intrastate population)

Houston

Dallas-Fort Worth

Philadelphia

Washington, D.C. (The Beltway)

Atlanta

Another Atlanta (different resolution)

Boston

The only bounded area of Phoenix

Detroit

Seattle

San Francisco Bay Area

San Diego

Minneapolis–Saint Paul

Denver

The Inland Empire (CA)

Baltimore

St. Louis

Las Vegas

Portland

Cleveland - so much boundedness!

Kansas City

San Antonio

Salt Lake City

Pittsburgh

Norfolk

Indianapolis

Nashville

Where are the furthest places from an Interstate in the lower 48?

This question has been asked many times before and you can find answers online, but basically 160 miles and higher and you're about as far as you can get. See below for a little map I made of this. 

Furthest from an Interstate

How about those tiny areas bounded by Interstates?

These are pretty interesting and if I had a file that included every loop of an Interstate on/off ramp then I could have done more here but as it is I had to work with what I had and I found 16 small, bounded-by-Interstates areas across the United States, including two in Alaska. Most of these seem to be correct so I've added them below, with a note where it seems to be caused by a mismatch between Census block boundaries and Interstate line locations. Usually they line up but in a few cases they don't so the population gets assigned to the wrong block - but this is very rare.

Somewhat hemmed in

Actually pretty leafy here

Also pretty leafy here too

Downtown apartments in St. Louis?

Anchorage

West Bottom Flats, etc

This one's mostly empty space

Fairly unexciting here

A very interesting little chunk of space (street view)

Another Anchorage, AK one

The oldest/fuzziest street view imagery in the US?

People definitely live here, but not many

Yeah, this is just an anomaly

Another weird anomaly

I think it's just trucks and truckers here

Yeah, no. But two Census blocks fit perfectly in here, so hmm

Notes: like I said above, this was just a bit of map/data fun, in keeping with what I do here on my blog. But of course I also find it interesting from an urban planning and transportation point of view, particularly the small areas tightly bounded by Interstates. Sometimes Census blocks don't align perfectly with Interstates so in some cases you get tiny areas that seem like they have small populations but this isn't the case. But there are very few of these. There is one area where it looks like a truck stop area with a population of 18. I'm not sure if that's because there were 18 truckers sleeping there on Census data 2020. The guidance from the US Census Bureau specifically mentions truckers and says that they should use their usual residential location as their address, so who knows. The one above, apparently with 12 people in it, is two Census blocks and the data from the US Census Bureau says there are 12 people there, so not sure what's going on. I even went back and checked the raw data again, but it definitely says population in 2020 was 12.