middle of nowhere

Being born and raised in the Bavarian countryside, close to the Czech and former border to Eastern Germany, where forests are all over the place and the next larger city is quite a long drive, I asked myself one day, if this is the middle of nowhere.

First question is now how to define the middle of nowhere. So I took the easy approach and said, that’s a place which is far away from the next highway or larger street. I could also have gone down the way to say next town, but in that case things get quickly very tricky, as just looking at town size is def. not enough, as there might be several smaller towns very close nearby. So my hypothesis became: we build streets to connect places where many people live and shape this connection in a way, that many people who live in between can also quickly access these places. So case there's no larger street next to you, chance is low, that there are many people living next to you. Definitely another pet project to prove this thesis, but would just stick with it for now.

Even using the highway and larger street distance definition is already quite tricky, because you could use air line or actual distance on the street road network. If you decide for the actual road network, this will vary by transport mode, which will get relevant especially in steep mountain areas, where you will not be able to go by car at all, but def. walk there. So risk is high to lose many datapoints by selecting the car option. But let’s talk about the details later on and get started. First of all I’ve been running an analysis as the crow flies, knowing in advance, that this will not deliver valuable results in the Alps - dirty but quick. To fine tune this, I’ve been running a second analysis using the real walking distance.