Total population / total land area is an irrelevant statistic for country comparison. By population-weighted density the United States isn't significantly less dense than Western Europe.
Unfortunately, directly comparable, prepared numbers are difficult to come by. The 3 most memorable sources I've found are:
* https://theconversation.com/think-your-country-is-crowded-th... - Discusses (introduces?) the concept of "lived density" and provides graphs for Europe. I'm not sure how well the author was familiar with related work regarding population-weight density, which seems to be the more correct term.
* https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.01167 - A COVID-19 pandemic-related paper which incidentally includes comparable population-weighted density metrics for both Western Europe and the United States.
I haven't looked into things since 2018 (excepting taking note of the 2020 COVID-19 paper), but IIRC census.gov has some population-weighted density numbers somewhere based on MSA and census block (tract?) proximity. It's not easily comparable to available European statistics, but it might be a good place to start if you want to play around with U.S. density numbers.
Maybe there have been better resources published since the above.
Unfortunately, directly comparable, prepared numbers are difficult to come by. The 3 most memorable sources I've found are:
* https://theconversation.com/think-your-country-is-crowded-th... - Discusses (introduces?) the concept of "lived density" and provides graphs for Europe. I'm not sure how well the author was familiar with related work regarding population-weight density, which seems to be the more correct term.
* https://ssrn.com/abstract=3119965 - A low-level analytical discussion regarding population-weighted density as a metric.
* https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.01167 - A COVID-19 pandemic-related paper which incidentally includes comparable population-weighted density metrics for both Western Europe and the United States.
I haven't looked into things since 2018 (excepting taking note of the 2020 COVID-19 paper), but IIRC census.gov has some population-weighted density numbers somewhere based on MSA and census block (tract?) proximity. It's not easily comparable to available European statistics, but it might be a good place to start if you want to play around with U.S. density numbers.
Maybe there have been better resources published since the above.