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Howard county connects to the northern suburbs in Montgomery county, Central MD is Central, MD regardless. Sure Howard is closer to Bmore but the sprawl has very little separation. BTW my key word was "almost" continuously.
Above the river is Howard and below is Montgomery County:
That's where the whole CSA argument gets cloudy because DC's sprawl is truncated to the Northeast because of Baltimore. So, it isn't DC that's sprawling towards Delaware, it's Baltimore.
Location: That star on your map in the middle of the East Coast, DMV
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Quote:
Originally Posted by KodeBlue
That's where the whole CSA argument gets cloudy because DC's sprawl is truncated to the Northeast because of Baltimore. So, it isn't DC that's sprawling towards Delaware, it's Baltimore.
I 100% agree, but I am going by what the OP posted, he/she asked which MSA/CSA region felt larger, in which Boston's region includes parts outside the MSA as well as DC's.
Either way the point of mentioning Central Maryland should not be necessarily a cut off point of is not even relevant, because IMO DC's MSA boundaries alone feel larger than greater Boston and its immediate suburbs, the beltway being one of the main factors here as it connects many of the suburbs around DC. Beyond that the area spreads all the way to W VA., and East to the Chesapeake Bay.
Last edited by the resident09; 05-12-2015 at 07:45 AM..
dc has a law where no building can be taller than the washington monument. boston skyscrapers make the metro feel larger.
I'd say the opposite is true. DC's height restrictions (and it's grid layout) make construction spread out. Downtown DC feels larger because it has to cover a larger area in order to have the required square footage in office buildings. Furthermore, because of the height restrictions and limited space in downtown DC, you see far more large scale development outside the city limits. You could make a Rosslyn/Kendall comparison, but metro Boston doesn't have much approaching the development that the DC area has in places like Arlington (the Ballston, VA Square, Clarendon, Courthouse Corridor), National Harbor (our Assembly Square development may come close), Silver Spring, Chevy Chase, Bethesda, Rockville, Crystal City, and even as far away as Tyson's Corner. That's why the DC metro area feels bigger to me. Boston's towers allow for the CBD and the metro area to be more compact because you can squeeze more square footage of office/residential/retail into a smaller footprint.
The only situation that I think could make Boston feel bigger is if you drive from Lynn down to Quincy Center or vice versa. That's a fairly unbroken urban stretch along the coast for a little over 20 miles. I can't remember any completely unbroken urban stretch in the DC area covering that distance. Still, that's a pretty specific snapshot and having lived in both, I still think the DC area feels bigger by a decent margin.
Bostonians also seem to be more comfortable with their 'place' in the world, and don't really think about their 'ranking' at all. D.C. seems to be obsessed with this, for some strange reason.
I personally think this is all a wish by SOME in the D.C. area to completely erase any connection to their true Southern roots, by any means they can grab onto to. It appears to be getting more desperate lately, both on C-D and in real life.
Uh, no. Boston is one of the most "little man syndrome" cities in the country. I love New England and have family out there, but zam is it provincial.
To me, DC feels larger. All of those little urban nodes centered around its extensive metro system feel more urban than Boston's little village/town center style nodes outside the city. Boston's have retained a lot more character, though I wouldn't be surprised if DC's TOD nodes never really had much character to begin with and were just typical suburbia for the most part.
With both cities, it is a bit crazy how quickly you can go from the direct center of the metro into what feels like semi-rural areas.
I love New England and have family out there, but zam is it provincial.
Haha, I almost added in my last post that Boston being so provincial is one of the reasons it feels smaller (DC seems to be made up of people from all over). It's definitely true.
Those places aren't part of Boston's Metro area (except Plymouth the smaller communities of Marion, Mattapoisett, and Wareham). That 195 Corridor is definitely more aligned with Providence and it's part of Providence's MSA. The latter part and Route 25 (a tiny corner of Plymouth, Marion, Mattapoisett, and Wareham) feels more like an extension of the Cape than part of the metro area (although Plymouth County is part of Boston's MSA). So the Southern edge of Plymouth county doesn't feel like Boston. Not surprising since the MSA numbers are based on commuters and counties and Plymouth County is far more heavily populated further north.
To me, the I-495 beltway generalization seems to be the best way to to get a visualization of what most would consider to be "metro Boston." There are exceptions to that rule. For example, I feel like the gateway cities to "Metro Boston" are as follows (starting in the NE). Newburyport, Haverhill, Salem NH, Tyngsborough, Westford, Boxborough, Hudson, Marlborough, Hopkinton, Milford, Bellingham, Franklin, Attleboro (really the Boston/Providence boundary), Norton, Taunton, Middleborough, Plympton, Plymouth (from downtown Plymouth North). Once you get further from Boston than those cities, you lose the feeling of being in a bigger metro area.
As far as which is bigger, I don't know if it's that I've been here for so long now, but Metro DC feels a little larger, especially as you head South. It's definitely more sprawling whereas much of Metro Boston feels semi-rural. We don't have the same level of urban development in the suburbs that DC does. And most of the urban cities ringing Boston feel more like independent urban centers that have morphed into Boston (Quincy, Lynn, Waltham, etc)- not the result of DC's growth (which is what places, Bethesda, Rockville and much of Arlington along the Metro feel like).
DC overlaps with Baltimore pretty quickly, but Boston does with Providence too. South of Attleboro, it really feels like Providence.
Nice post. I think I tried to say a lot of what you put here, maybe not as eloquently though. I am harder on Boston than I should be because I lived there and know it better (plus Pats fans be getting on my nerves this week).
dc has a law where no building can be taller than the washington monument. boston skyscrapers make the metro feel larger.
Boston had height limits as well for years. They only really have two semi-tall buildings because Logan is so close to their downtown core. Plus DC has a ton of high rises in Arlington - not sure if they are as tall as the Hancock/Pru.
Highrises have little to do with how urban or large a place feels. Both of these places have less high rises than Houston but still feel more "big city".
Washington, D.C. is larger at every measure at this point; City, MSA, CSA, both UAs (the United States one and the United Nations one) and on both UA measures it has the denser outcome over Boston, over 2X the built density. The only measure left is the DMA and Washington should be larger in that too within the next year or two.
Boston and its inner ring of suburbs, like Cambridge and other close-knit ones like it are cohesively dense and built up but it is not like Washington is devoid of this feature either. There is Alexandria and much of Arlington and Montgomery Counties serving this function as well. The difference is that beyond the inner ring, the Washington D.C. area is noticeably more cohesive and built up, there are less "large spaces" between one place of residence to the next as compared to Greater Boston MSA and CSA.
New England is a bit different as it is, the United States has given New England its own measure to weigh its size by its own accords with NECTA; specifically designed to even the playing field for New England areas due to the restrictive land use regulations, preservation rules, and building codes in New England townships (including the ones in Boston's middle to outer ring suburban areas).
In the CBD, the wall-to-wall continuous style of Washington makes the CBD area feel larger and more expansive/continuous, Boston takes over in the outlying neighborhoods of the CBD, that is where it takes it to a higher gear than Washington, D.C. and maintains it for nearly the entire city proper and well into the inner ring suburbs. Washington by the time it gets to the inner ring suburbs has caught back up and the two cities should feel about the same size at that point, then you go further out from the inner ring suburban areas and Washington takes over quite solidly in my personal observation. It maintains a denser, more cohesive, and more uniformly planned style from there on out, giving it a noticeably larger feel on the metropolitan area or urban area level, definitely in the combined statistical area level. The TOD suburbs in particular really skew the feeling one way in Washington's favor over Boston too, but they aren't the only component either.
Last edited by Trafalgar Law; 05-12-2015 at 01:50 PM..
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