The U.S. population hub
Let’s return to the original FedEx Problem of where to establish a shipping hub. Every
ten years the U.S. Census Bureau calculates a point called the “center of population.”
Could this point be the hub we are looking for? According to the current Bureau website
[13] the center of population is
the point at which an imaginary, flat, weightless, and rigid map of the United
States would balance perfectly if weights of identical value were placed on it so
that each weight represented the location of one person on the date of the census.
This clearly is not what we want in a hub. The U.S. is large enough so that the
curvature matters in measuring distance, and even if we could treat the U.S. area as
flat, this population center is the center of gravity for the population distribution, and,
The U.S. population hub
Let’s return to the original FedEx Problem of where to establish a shipping hub. Every
ten years the U.S. Census Bureau calculates a point called the “center of population.”
Could this point be the hub we are looking for? According to the current Bureau website
[13] the center of population is
the point at which an imaginary, flat, weightless, and rigid map of the United
States would balance perfectly if weights of identical value were placed on it so
that each weight represented the location of one person on the date of the census.
This clearly is not what we want in a hub. The U.S. is large enough so that the
curvature matters in measuring distance, and even if we could treat the U.S. area as
flat, this population center is the center of gravity for the population distribution, and,
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