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by benjaminwootton 1246 days ago
McKinsey style interview question. How many road intersections are there in the US?
4 comments

Google says that Quora user thinks: Can’t answer the second question, but as for the first one, there are 6,302,865 intersections for the 497 urbanized areas in the United States.

ChatGPT says: I'm sorry, I don't have an exact number for the number of road intersections in the US. However, I can provide you with some information that may help you arrive at an estimate. According to the Federal Highway Administration, as of 2020, there were approximately 4 million miles of public roads in the US. If you assume that each mile of road has an average of four intersections (which would include cross streets, driveways, and other points where roads connect), that would result in an estimated 16 million road intersections in the US. However, this is just an estimate and the actual number may vary depending on factors such as population density, urbanization, and road infrastructure.

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My instinct would be to compare a representative neighbourhood's population to the number of intersections and extrapolate.
I'm guessing three to four orders of magnitude more than there are intersections between runways and other runways or taxiways.