this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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Those two counties are Petroleum County, with a population of about 500, and Garfield County with a population of about 1,100. Both counties have a single town with about a quarter of the population.
This means a majority of the population live in the country, and likely work the lands they live on. This means no commute to work, which is what was measured.
This is a flaw in the methodology. Rurual Montana is not a bastion of urban planning. It is a mistake to look at travel to work exclusively. People need to travel to many destinations. And those living in those two counties probably use cars for everything else.
What the hell, Garfield county is about the quarter size of my country (the Netherlands, but only has 0,007% of the population. That's mind boggling to me
I wouldnt say it is a flaw, really. The data in general is a good approximation of auto dependence. And any researcher who isn't an idiot will see the same thing you did and simply discard the data in these counties as obvious outliers. Sure, we can imagine a more accurate metric for measuring auto dependency for the purposes of creating a very nice map for public consumption. But it your purpose is simply to conduct some statistical analysis, I don't think this dataset is bad - or at least not a bad start.
It's only bad if misinterpreted.
Couple of areas of Nevada like that as well. But it's not that they work on their own land a lot of the people work at the mines and they only drive maybe a half mile if that to get to their bus stop where the mines run buses for the hour to two hour drive out to the location and back.