As anyone who's ever gone on a road trip in Australia will know, drive far enough from one of the bigger coastal cities and eventually you'll reach "waving territory", a place where other vehicles are rare enough that the sight of one warrants a wave. Not a big one mind you - that's unseemly. Just a simple acknowledgment, conveyed by raising one or two fingers from the steering wheel. The wave is not always reciprocated, and that's fine*. Anyway, my wife and I have been on a number of road trips (often via a pub or two) and at some point I got thinking about whether the parts of Australia where waves were more likely - 'waving territory' - could be roughly mapped, based on the distance from the nearest town, and its population size.
The Data
The map below shows ----- cities and towns. Most come from the ABS's Urban Centres and Localities, but I've also added several small** outback towns like Tibooburra & Birdsville, and removed a few of the more remote islands in the Torres Strait as they won't effect the mainland. The ABS data can be downloaded here (look for 'Suburbs and Localities - 2021 - Shapefile').
Towns & Distances
The table below shows a rough guess at the distance in kilometres you need to be from a town - based on its population - before you are in 'waving territory'. The idea being, the smaller the town, and therefore - presumably - the more remote the town, the less likely you are to see other vehicles on the way to and from it. Realistically though, it's a case by case basis, and depends much more on the local geography than any hard and fast rules (you can edit the distance for any particular town by clicking the circles representing each town in the data on the map).
| Population | Distance (km) |
|---|---|
| 1M+ | |
| 250K+ | |
| 100K+ | |
| 50K+ | |
| 20K+ | |
| 10K+ | |
| 5K+ | |
| 1K+ | |
| 500+ | |
| < 500 |
The map shows the waving territory for the current distances and you can generate the new territory via the 'Calculate Territory' button (which is only active when the settings have been changed). You can also show and hide the towns, and the distances around the towns, using the buttons on the right. Note that depending on the distances set, generating the waving territory can take a while, so please be patient.
Calculate Territory Reset Towns Distances
City/Towns Distance around City/Towns Waving Territory
© OpenStreetMap contributors © CARTO. Made with Leaflet
Waving Territory by State
Based on the current settings, this is how the states & territories compare (bars show the percent of each state that is waving territory):
...and the percent of Australia as a whole:
Download the current data (as GeoJSON):
Waving Territory data Towns data
Disclaimers
Obviously the approach isn't perfect, if for no other reason, distances are as the crow flies, rather than by road, and I probably should exclude major highways, as at least in my experience, there's no waving on those, even the more remote ones. And in some places - notably Horn Island in the Torres Strait (where we were over new year's) - people would wave at each other's vehicles while in town (this seems to be the case in Flinders Island as well).
* fuck them.
** population < 500