No, didn't see that story. Saying that it is the size of Greater London has SOME value since most people would visualize that as being the size of some large city that they are familiar with. That might be good enough if getting the notion across within an order of magnitude is good enough. But, for instance, if I translate Greater London Area to Greater Denver Area, assuming that London is roughly the size of Denver, it would be a huge error. Greater London is ~600 sq mi, while Greater Denver is ~8300 sq mi, or a factor of 14 larger. But, until I looked up the numbers and compared them, I would have thought that the London metro area was larger than Denver one.

But saying that it is the size of some island is going to be meaningless for most people since islands come in sizes spanning orders of magnitude. Telling the vast majority of people an area in square miles (or kilometers) would be very misleading once you get above a fairly small amount, since so few people can do rough squares or square roots on the fly. It would have been better to just tell them the linear dimension, such as it being roughly 30 miles across. Most people have a sense of these kinds of distances by visualizing comparable distances they are familiar with, such as to a neighboring town or between mile markers on a highway) and can then easily visualize an object that big across in comparison.

BTW, the London vs Denver comparison underscores a point that the proponents of public transit always seem to miss -- implementing a cost-efficient and practical public transit system in an area of 600 sq miles that has a population of about 9 million is a FAR cry from trying to do the same in an area that is 14 times as large with just one-third the population (i.e., a difference in population density approaching a factor of 50).

I've been to Denver, (my brother in law lives there and my wife grew up in Littleton), and it did seem to be spread very thinly on the ground. A lot of it seemed to be car parks - something I would notice coming from a country where finding a parking space is sometimes quite a challenge. The area statistic is interesting as it is almost identical to the ratio of overall population densities for the two countries.

 

People who can’t stay in their traffic lanes, particularly around a corner where two lanes turn left (right in Great Britain?) There are several busy intersections in my area where this is the case. As often as not, the guy beside me simply crosses between the two lanes without looking. If I were not watching for them, I expect I would be hit every couple of days. In many of these cases, the lanes are clearly marked right around the turn, but they go right across the solid lines without signaling or watching out for traffic.

I learned early on to never assume that the other folks will obey the traffic rules, and it had served me well. But, I must admit, I didn't appreciate to what degree that American drivers DO follow the rules, or at least operate in their vicinity, until I spent a couple of weeks in Taiwan, particularly in the south. In the north, stop signs are little more than strong suggestions. In the south, even traffic lights are barely mild hints.