Why are latitude-longitude rectangles bad for spatial indexing?
Rectangles distort dramatically near the poles and have inconsistent center-to-edge versus center-to-corner distances. Grid cells at 80° latitude are compressed to ribbon-thin slivers, making it impossible to define 'nearby' as a fixed-radius query with uniform costs across the globe.
Answered in
Why Uber Tiles the Planet in HexagonsHexagons with equidistant neighbors replace lat/long trigonometry with O(1) table lookups for finding nearby drivers and calculating surge pricing.
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