For example, there’s one Utah casino location in my sample, but gambling is illegal in the state, and there are no Indian reservation casinos. Google classifies places as casinos based on their own criteria, and not everything is an actual casino by a legal definition. However, it’s tough to say what the actual percentage is based on this data. After all, some 80 percent of the country’s population lives in urban areas. So the national percentage for population is likely higher. This is significantly lower than the Northeast’s 50 percent mark, but keep in mind that the sample also includes uninhabited areas. Of those samples, 36 percent of them are 25 miles or less from a casino.
Using the Google Places API, I took about 7,500 samples in twenty-mile increments, east to west and north to south. Naturally, I wondered what it is like in other parts of the country, so I sampled uniformly across the United States looking for the nearest casino. The New York Times covered casinos in the Northeast and noted that more than half of the population is within 25 miles of a casino.
