I've been looking for ways to compare the sizes of cities. Amsterdam is small and very compact, while Atlanta and Dallas are spread out and cover vast areas. I still have not found an easy way to compare city sizes, but I came across two size comparisons of subway and road systems in various cities.
Fake is the new real plots 36 subway systems of the world, all presented on the same scale. It shows that London is large and Paris is small. Not sure that that's accurate.
More recently, the Rice shool of architecture in Houston created a poster comparing ring roads of 27 international cities and layered them all at the same scale. As it turned out, Houston has the largest system, Beijing was second. Well, we should probably call Beijing first. Not only are there 6 ring roads in Beijing, but also is Houston's third and largest ring road still under construction.
The best city size comparison I found on a website of the Dallas based After Image Photograph Gallery. It shows a newspaper clipping from a 1983 Dallas Morning News article, confirming what I had figured already: Amsterdam is tiny and Dallas is huge.
