Comment by vouwfietsman

This data is indeed not irregularly distributed, in fact the fun thing about geospatial data is that you always know the maximum extent of it.

About your binary tree comment: yes this is absolutely valid, but consider then that binary trees also are a bad fit for distributed computing, where data is often partitioned at the top level (making it no longer a binary tree but a set of binary trees) and cross-node joins are expensive.