You are talking to one of the best travelled in America people that you could know, I have been travelling this country in every mode of transportation for 55 years, I have lived in many, many states, I was what used to be called a drifter for much of my life, I even lived for years as the classic drifter as a hitchhiking traveler with no destination, living on odd jobs and such, all the time seeing the nation from close up, back roads, Interstates, and everything in between. The majority of my life has been spent in the west and southwest, I am well aware that from a plane, there is vast amounts of empty space.
The reason America appears overcrowded to me is that it is, more than doubling our population in my life time has been a setback for the quality of life here.
When I was a youth and our schools taught American, they taught us about the over populated hell holes of the world, like India and China, (The United States was a distant third in population at the time) now we are approaching what those nations populations were at that time.
Personally I liked America better a 100 or even a 150 million people ago.
Don’t disagree. Merely pointing out that much of the perception of population density is because those who decry it choose to hang out where everybody else chooses to hang out.
A great deal of the country is less densely populated than 50 or 100 years ago. I have backpacked through areas of Utah and Colorado where miner’s and homesteader’s abandoned cabins are common. Nobody lives there anymore. Same for the Ozarks of MO and AR, only more so.
My parents both grew up in Kansas. Their hometowns are today more or less ghost towns. Nobody wants to live there anymore.
The country has become at the same time both more densely populated and the population more concentrated than it used to be.