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Look zip, the people that actually live in Eastern PA have given you our feelings (me ) and definitions (rainrock and dunderino) and you just don't agree. So what? Why is it so important to you that the greater Philadelphia area includes more areas?
....This just happened to me on the Pittsburgh forum with pittnurse. Do I post in such a way as to make people create false controversies in their head??? What's going on here???
If you reread, you will see that Duderino and I are saying the same thing and Rainrock and I have agreed that we're splitting hairs and discussing minutia.
You and I however, are having a conversation where the little man in your head tells you I said something I didn't.
It's like I say "congress spends to much money, and they make poor foreign policy decisions. Congressional pork spending is out of control". You then reply "you're wrong, controling foreign money is good. How else can they pay for all that pork to feed the foreign children"??????
Also, of course I'm originally from the (inner) Philly metro. It would be ridiculous to have an opinion having never lived there.
ahem, that's a little woman in my head. I would never allow a man in there. Yep, there is something about the way you say things that come out unkind.
What I've been trying to say is that being included in an area that I don't have much to do with bugs me and even if the numbers show that the area around Philadelphia is growing, it does not go up to Quakertown.
ahem, that's a little woman in my head. I would never allow a man in there. Yep, there is something about the way you say things that come out unkind.
Well, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings and I didn't mean to be unkind. I now remember in an earlier post you said you had a husband, so I didn't mean to be sexist when I referred to the little man in your head....For all of this I apologize.
Quote:
Originally Posted by toobusytoday
....it does not go up to Quakertown.
Now this I did say and this is something to discuss.
Rational Minds CAN differ when it comes to things like our feelings or our perception of culture, etc. As an example, toobusytoday feels
"What I've been trying to say is that being included in an area that I don't have much to do with bugs me ".
I can understand that. Rainrock feels Quakertown is REALLY REALLY far. I can understand that too....While I enjoy discussing things like the above, the truth is, in the end, it's all just opinion so no one is ever right. For this reason, when it comes to questions of this nature (boundries of a metro in particular), I prefer to use the more rigorous definitions as defined by the federal government.....but that's me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by toobusytoday
And now, this woman is done with this thread.
Ah come on, don't leave, I said I was sorry I promise to be nice if you promise to read what I wrote.
Let's make Quakertown the Philly MSA's northern boundary and call it a day.
Seriously though, there's no reason why this can't be a civil discussion with an exchange of facts and perspectives. For example, Quakertown IS in Bucks County, which by default includes it in the Census Bureau's definition of the metro area.
Zip: I appreciate all of the information you provided as well.
Decades ago, Philadelphia was home to light and heavy industry. Today it is mostly about service industries largely related to the public welfare dependency of the people who live there. Ivan-1
And we'll conveniently bypass the 300,000 center city office workers that run the gamut from lawyers,communications to pharmacueticals etc..,
Hundreds of thousands of professional health care workers.
Robust tourism/ hotel/cultural sector.
50,000 longshoreman.
Thriving natural energy market.
construction market surpassed only by NYC and Chicago.
A dozen institutions of higher learning.
But if it works for you lets just pretend that all doesn't exist to allow your misinformed banter.
Over 25% of working Philadelphians work outside the city in the suburbs. One of Manayunk's biggest selling points has always been that people can live in the city and have a closer commute to the KOP area. I think KOP has grown beyond just being a suburb of Philly, it has been steadily draining Philadelphia's job and economic base. But then again so has the New Jersey suburbs. But I think it should be all classified as one large metroplex with no one city or county dominating the others.
I consider any area that that the Philadelphia airport serves as their closest airport should be considered "the greater Philadelphia" area. But, hey, that's just me!
The server reminded me that I haven't posted anything to this forum yet; some of you who also post to Phillyblog.com should recognize me and my handle (don't worry, .sig coming soon if this implementation of the BBS software supports it; I note that this site and Phillyblog use the same software, but the implementation here supports multiple quotes in a single reply, a utility I sorely miss on PB). So having slogged through this half-useful, half-pointless thread, here's a catchall followup.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Duderino
I definitely agree. Mercer, although some do not agree there is a "central" Jersey, should be considered the "buffer" between the New York and Philly Metros, if anything.
Until shortly after the 1990 census, Mercer County, NJ, was part of what was then known as the Philadelphia-Wilmington-Trenton Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA)*. The reason it is now part of the New York-Northern New Jersey-Southern Connecticut Combined Statistical Area (CSA)* is solely because shifting it allowed the Federal Government to give its employees who work in Mercer County a pay raise. The Federal Government bases its salary scales on the cost-of-living indexes for micropolitan*, metropolitan and combined metropolitan areas, and the scales (obviously) vary from area to area. The cost-of-living index for the New York region is significantly higher than that for the Philadelphia region. Given that commuting patterns from Mercer County -- one of the principal factors the Census Bureau uses to determine whether a given county belongs in a metro/micropolitan area or not -- are bidirectional into both of the combined metros it borders (historical trivia: and have always been; Princeton University is where it is because the New York and Philadelphia Presbyteries both wanted to establish a college; the two pooled their resources and picked a location exactly halfway between the two cities), the Feds could fatten the pay envelopes of Trenton-area workers simply by a statistical shift.
From a media standpoint, I'd say that Mercer County is clearly part of the Philadelphia, not the New York, media market. Cable systems in the county carry the Philadelphia network stations, and the only TV stations with news bureaus in the county broadcast from Philadelphia.
(Somewhat relevant aside: The overlap may be a bit larger than some of us think. Riding an NJ Transit Northeast Corridor Line train from Trenton to New York two weeks back, I noticed that there were ads promoting both events at the Mann Music Center and the Temple Health System at stations in Middlesex County too. Those didn't disappear completely until the line entered Union County.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Icy Tea
I think its becoming one large region, less the Philadelphia region and more a region that has Philadelphia in it. But weather wise, Reading and Allentown differ enough to have their own forecasts( and the first 24 hour all local weather cable channel). News is also dominated by local papers and cable, the Inquirer is minimally read but Channel 6 ABC does have a strong presence. People in eastern Berks commute heavily to Montgomery County but less to Philly. One good thing about high gas prices, maybe they won't want to move here and drive so far to work!
Quote:
Originally Posted by toobusytoday
or less. There are big gaps from Hatfield North. A business here and there, strip shopping centers in Quakertown then more businesses here and there and then a couple more shopping centers. Not ubanized. Urbanized is city (urban), suburban is areas surounding cities mostly made up of developments and McMansions. And then there are towns with neighborhoods and that is what I see North of Hatfield.
I understand what you are saying zip, but you are not using the correct adjective. Unless there are skyscrapers and city stuff, it's not urban. Perhaps you mean developed. Oh well, it's not as if this forum is going to decide the next wikepedia definition of the Philadelphia region.
Um, the statisticians hew more closely to my more Manichean definition, which is that everything that is not rural is urban. When demographers and geographers speak of "urbanized areas," they are referring to land that has been developed, period, for uses other than farm or forest or suchlike. By that definition, every suburbanite lives in an urban area, regardless how said suburbanite views his or her particular patch of land. And that land can still contain significant parcels of undeveloped land between developments to fall within an urbanized area boundary. From Newtown Square west to West Chester, West Chester Pike (PA 3) is only sporadically developed, and there are notable stretches of farmland in the vicinity of the Delaware-Chester County line. Yet -- and I should look at a map to confirm this -- all of PA 3, which stretches from Philadelphia City Hall to the Chester County Court House, runs through urbanized area.
I use the Manichean definition because I think it better captures the impact of development on the land. The more you build on land, the less water it absorbs; anyone notice how floods seem to occur more frequently, and with greater impact, along area streams? That is a consequence of urbanization far more than it is of global warming. Traffic congestion can get as bad on two-lane highways through not-terribly-dense suburbs as it can on busy city streets because our patterns of suburban development force all traffic onto main roads for just about everything, including the "trip to the corner store for a gallon of milk". And so on.
Pardon me, toobusy, but it's you who are not using the correct adjective: an opposite defintion is more accurate when it comes to function -- unless it's all trees and cows or rows of corn or soybeans, it's urban.
Quote:
Originally Posted by zip95
Do you mean lumping the Delaware Valley and Lehigh Valley together? If that's what you mean, then I more-or-less agree. It's stupid to start lumping together the East Coast MSA's. Once we start down that path we'll end up with this. The BosWash MSA
There is already a commonly used term for this: "megalopolis." BosWash is the oldest of these conurbations in the United States. In the 1970s (when The World Almanac included a map of the US showing what the Census Bureau considered megalopolises in formation as well), it appeared that the area around the Great Lakes from Pittsburgh to Chicago, the Florida East Coast from Jacksonville to Miami, and the Pacific coast from San Francisco to San Diego were also developing megalopolitan characteristics, one of those being that metropolitan areas were bumping up against one another -- a phenomenon that is long established in the land of the Acelas, as this very discussion illustrates. We haven't "started down" this path; the journey is complete wherever your intercity passenger train has a pantagraph on its locomotive.
Quote:
Originally Posted by toobusytoday
zip,
The people in the counties not in the traditional Phil metro areas don't neccessarily commute or maybe even care about center city Philadelphia. When my husband and I lived in Delaware and Chester counties we didn't commute or have that much more to do with Philadelphia then we do now living in Lehigh county. Many people commute to the other suburbs, not to the city. My husband worked for GE and commuted to King of Prussia for many years. Some people commuted to Wilmington. We never lived in Philadelphia or it's inner suburbs so there was no attachment. Lot's of people are like that. Just because there is growth spreading outside of Philadelphia, doesn't mean that it's FROM Philadelphia. As far as I know SEPTA doesn't go into Quakertown and there sure isn't any regional rail there either. Guess we could complain about that.
But thanks for the insight from Pitt!
Note that the Federal definition of a metropolitan area asks not whether residents of a county commute to the original core city to work, but rather whether they commute to one of the existing metropolitan area counties. This has been the case for decades; the Census Bureau has long recognized the interconnectedness and increasing multicenteredness of metropolitan regions. (The term "Edge City," coined by Joel Garreau with his book of the same name, is also an effort to come to terms with this multicenteredness; King of Prussia is an Edge City if ever there was one, but the best-known Edge City on the East Coast is Tysons Corner, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC.)
Also relevant to this discussion is that the base political unit for the Federal metropolitan area is the county, except in New England, where counties are both politically and administratively irrelevant; in those six states, it is the municipality -- town and city -- that is the base unit. Several people have noted that Quakertown roughly marks the point at which one "leaves Metro Philadelphia" and "enters the metro Lehigh Valley," but since one does not leave Montgomery County for several miles beyond Quakertown, one remains in the Philadelphia MSA until that point.
Quote:
Originally Posted by newmarlig
I think the Philly metro area reached further when Ed Rendell was the mayor.
Some argue that now that he is Governor, it stretches all the way to Harrisburg.
*In 2003, the Census Bureau rolled out a new classification scheme for urbanized areas with new terminology. The only carryover from the old scheme is the "Metropolitan Statistical Area" (MSA), whose definition remains pretty much unchanged; joining it is a new category, the "Micropolitan Statistical Area" (same acronym), which is a county or counties with a city of 10,000 to 50,000 population at its core and evidence of economic interdependence between the core town's county and surrounding counties (e.g., some commuting). The former "Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area" (CMSA) composed of two or more "Primary Metropolitan Statistical Areas" (PMSAs) has been replaced by the "Combined Statistical Area" (CSA) consisting of two or more MSAs (metro- or micro-). The first Census whose data will be organized according to this scheme will take place in 2010, but definitions of the terms and lists of areas are already available at Census Bureau Home Page.
" Several people have noted that Quakertown roughly marks the point at which one "leaves Metro Philadelphia" and "enters the metro Lehigh Valley," but since one does not leave Montgomery County for several miles beyond Quakertown, one remains in the Philadelphia MSA until that point."
jumping back in for a minute- Quakertown is wholly in Bucks county, so what is considered the Northern most point for the Philadelphia MSA?
I'm glad you clarified the definition of urban, I always understood that to mean city but apparently, that is not correct.
I never meant to imply that my feelings were based on any kind of statistics, and in fact, I think I said that a few times. Thanks for the stats MarketStEl, even if I don't want to be considered "urban", I'm glad to know I am Lehigh Vally urban and not Philadelphia urban. but there are cows and cornfields less then 1/2 a mile from my house.....
My mistake on misplacing Quakertown. I had visualized PA 309, but not the corner of Bucks County it passes through on its way from Philadelphia to Allentown. Thanks for the correction.
One interesting thing about the Lehigh Valley metro area is that it is large enough to merit its own VHF TV station, but it doesn't have one. (Jeez, Lancaster has one: WGAL, Channel 8.) But that's the whole media-market thing at work: the Lehigh Valley is within signal range of Philadelphia's TV stations. But isn't the same thing true for much of Lancaster County?
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) and definitions (rainrock and dunderino) and you just don't agree. So what? Why is it so important to you that the greater Philadelphia area includes more areas?
I promise to be nice if you promise to read what I wrote.
