We're already as congested as New York and California.

I'll deal with CA, since that is my home state. And I'm not sure that statement is really correct. At a minimum, it's a bit over simplified.

CA is really two states - the densely populated urban and suburban sprawls, and the lightly populated balance.

I can take 8 counties (roughly the LA and SF bay area, plus San Diego and Sacramento) and get a population roughly the same as FL - 21.9 million in those counties vs 22.6 mil in FL. But the areas occupied by those people are vastly different - 12,203 sq mi for the CA extract vs. 65,758 for all of FL. Those parts of CA are much more congested (measured in people per square mile) than FL. The remainder of CA has 17.0 million people and over 151,000 square miles. Population density there is less than 1/3 that of FL on average.

Looking at FL, the densest counties seem to be Broward and Orange, both a bit under 1500 people per sq mi. Seven of the 8 counties I separated out of CA have higher densities than this (from the 17,000+ in San Francisco to 1592 in Sacramento).

I'm sure I could do a similar analysis on NY. Fine. I'll just do it. NYC has 8.2 million folks crammed into 303 square miles. 27,000+ people per sq mi. The balance of NY is 11.31 million in 54253 sq miles, giving 208 people per sq mi.

Florida has a much more uniformly distributed population that either of these two states. I'd argue that FL can't hold a candle to the congestion that NY and CA have to deal with, even if that congestion is somewhat localized.

--Peter