How many interstates hold the US population (If we cram everyone into Mini Coopers)?

In 2009 a group of 21 Malaysian students were able to cram themselves into a single Mini Cooper*. A Mini Cooper is about 14.5 feet long which means the packing density they were able to achieve was around 1.45 people/linear foot of Mini Cooper length. Think about this...imagine the space we would have for data centers in the US if we could compress the footprint of the population by this amount!

I did the math and here's what it looks like.

People in Malaysia are smaller than Americans so that's the first adjustment that had to be made. Malaysia - avg weight is 153.4 lb. America avg weight is 199 lb. so theoretically ~16.18 Americans could fit in the same Mini Cooper. I don't think many people would volunteer to be the .18 person so let's just call it 16. Actually, let's make it even easier and call it 1 person per foot instead.

A Cooper is right around 6 feet wide with the mirrors folded in. This means that you can fit two mini-coopers side by side in a standard 12 foot highway lane.

So.

Every foot of a 4 lane highway could conceivably hold 8 people (when compressed). The longest 4 lane highway in the United States is Interstate 90 which runs from Seattle to Boston. If we were to start in Boston fill the entire highway with bumper to bumper Mini Coopers at max packing density. We'd be able to pack 127 million people onto just that road. In fact, we'd be able to cram the entire population onto just the three highways shown leaving so much room for the hardware that makes this photorealistic map generation possible!

*this record has since been broken and currently stands at 29 people/Mini, but I elected to use 21 because 29 seemed too uncomfortable.