[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.