A characterization of the uniform strong type $(1,1)$ bounds for averaging operators

We prove that in a metric measure space $(X, d, \mu)$, the averaging operators $A_{r, \mu }$ satisfy a uniform strong type $(1,1)$ bound $\sup_{r, \mu} \|A_{r, \mu }\|_{L^1\to L^1} < \infty$ if and only if $X$ satisfies a certain geometric condition, the equal radius Besicovitch intersection property.