It's here! OMB releases new Bulletin No. 18-04, Revised MSA/CSA Delineations (salaries, live in)
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It would not surprise me if Washington DC and Baltimore combine into a single MSA in the future. Those two cities are only about 40 miles driving distance from each other and what the stats tell us is that DC continues to add more counties to its metro area. There is a lot of cross commuting in those counties between Baltimore and DC.
The population is only going to increase and it's only a matter of time before those core counties will meet the 25% MSA threshold for both cities. The future Washington-Baltimore MSA will reach over 10 million and surpass Chicago to become the 3rd largest MSA in the country.
It's almost similar to the New York and Philadelphia situation. The only reason why New York and Philadelphia haven't combined into one CSA yet is because Mercer County keeps falling short of reaching the 25% MSA threshold with the New York MSA. Philly already reaches the CSA requirements for Mercer County with at least one of its core counties. Once that happens, New York and Philadelphia will combine into one CSA the way DC and Baltimore combined into one CSA decades ago.
I sure hope Philadelphia and New York never combine CSAs, that would be a totally useless metric.
CSA's do serve a purpose. Mostly for social and political trends, but also for regional planning in transportation, and regional media buys. As long as there is heavy commuting between points in a CSA, the population totals are important and meaningful.
That said, I believe more in the MSA population than the CSA. City population is also important for tax revenue and city infrastructure purposes. County population has become less important, IMO, though there are some tax ramifications there as well.
We now have at least two CSAs that contain MSAs that are not in their core MSA's DMA (Dominant Market Area, the standard geographic definition for media buys):
New York (Trenton remains in the Philadelphia DMA)
Orlando (added two counties in the Tampa-St. Pete DMA)
I really don't care what people choose to use them for, and I don't care for how the OMB currently defines MSA, CSA, UA. But I absolutely think CSA is the most useless of metrics. It's silly....
Could I pick a usage nit?
I know you're using "UA" to avoid using "USA", which means something else altogether normally, and your computer can't easily display lowercase Greek omicron (µ - I use a Mac).
But "UA" is also "Urbanized Area" in Census initial-speak. Perhaps use "uA" or even "uSA" instead as a better approximation?
And having Allentown/Bethlehem in the New York CSA was bogus in the first place.
What I heard back when the Trenton MSA was moved from the Philadelphia CSA to the New York CSA was that the move was made primarily to give Federal employees in Mercer County a pay raise (the New York CSA's COL adjustment is higher than the one for Philadelphia).
I suspect that core-county commute patterns are such that it could still be placed in either.
Also: I guess I missed when Douglas County, Kan., was added to the Kansas City-Overland-Park-Kansas City*, MO-KS CSA.
With which revision did that take place?
I still wonder whether, despite the presence of the University of Kansas in Lawrence, the Lawrence and Kansas City MSAs might merge into one eventually.
*Can someone explain to me why Overland Park, now the metro's second-largest city, appears in the CSA name but not the MSA name? A bunch of other MSAs have had their largest edge cities added to their names.
It's interesting that New York loss the Allentown MSA. I would really love if the Lehigh Valley joined the Philly CSA but I don't think our area has enough commuters to pull them over the 15% threshold. The Allentown area is more culturally tied to Philly than it is to New York anyway.
The highways, not to mention the Lehigh River itself, don't work in favor of that happening either.
The principal freeway(s) through the valley parallel the river: US 22, the Lehigh Valley Thruway, which skirts the three core cities to their north, and the newer I-78, which passes them on their south. (I think only Bethlehem has a freeway running through it: PA 378, which probably should become I-278 now, unless it's not connected to 78 at its southern end.)
Only the Pennsylvania Turnpike Northeast Extension (I-476) connects the valley with Philadelphia via a freeway, and it skirts the metro on its western end. Not to mention that Bucks County's employment is concentrated in its lower half; to get there from Allentown or Bethlehem requires travel on local highways. It's probably easier to get to one of the counties in the core New York MSA from the Lehigh Valley than to Lower Bucks.
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On a lighter note, I'm still surprised why Atlantic City doesn't get it's name in the Philly metro. It's been called the Philadelphia-Reading-Camden CSA for years now. I would argue that Atlantic City is a bigger economic presence in the Philly CSA than Camden is. I know that Camden is trying to revitalize itself but aside from its close proximity to Philadelphia, it's not a very relevant city in South Jersey right now. I think Camden's name should be removed to be called the Philadelphia-Reading-Atlantic City CSA.
The Philadelphia MSA was known for a while as the Philadelphia-Wilmington-Atlantic City MSA.
Camden, however, has more residents (~81,000) than Atlantic City (~39,000) does, so there's that as well.
Trenton is still part of New York CSA, since its in the same county as Princeton, and you can't split counties.
1) Are Princeton (Borough and Township are now one municipality; the two merged in 2013) and West Windsor Township (where Princeton Junction rail station is located) receiving significantly more inflows of commuters from NY CSA counties than they had been? I'm pretty sure such outflows as exist from Mercer County head more towards Bucks County, Pa., than towards Middlesex County, N.J. (Princeton itself is what it is now because it is located exactly halfway between New York and Philadelphia.)
2) It looks like you can split counties if you can persuade Congress to allow the split; I note that a portion of the city of Sullivan, Mo., that lies in a county outside the St. Louis MSA was added to the St. Louis MSA by Congressional action in the 1980s.
Finally this will all be resolved once the two urban areas making up DC and Baltimore are combined probably in the next 10 years to become 4th largest, Boston's just combined with Providence and is developed but much less dense.
If by "combined" here you mean "merged to form a single MSA," then no, Providence remains a separate MSA from Boston.
(I note, however, that the Massachusetts cities of Fall River and New Bedford, which are part of the Providence MSA, have been demoted in prominence in favor of the Rhode Island city of Warwick. I wonder why? New Bedford, the largest city in Bristol County, Mass., still has more residents than Warwick, though it's lost population.)
It's not really that crazy Monroe County is right next to Miami-Dade they even share the same area code. Key West just so happens to be an extension of Monroe County so it got swept in too.
The poster who said that Urbanized Area was actually the best metric for comparison has a point, and as Exhibit A in that person's favor I offer San Bernardino County, Calif.
The county is huge - and it stretches across the entire width of California, almost. (Los Angeles County gets in the way of it reaching the Pacific coast.) Yet most of the county is very sparsely settled, and large parts are uninhabited; the overwhelming bulk of its population lives in its extreme southwest corner, next to LA County.
Save for the uninhabited part - substitute presence of water for absence of residents - Monroe County, Fla., looks like it's an analog.
UA for DC is misleading and I'm certain we'll see combined with Baltimore's UA probably within 10 years, as we saw Boston's UA combine this year. This would definitely happen as I believe the MSA's stay separate.
Oh, so that's what you meant. The Census Bureau is now merging urbanized areas that cross MSA boundaries?
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