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Personally, I dread business trips to Silicon Valley. The traffic congestion around San Jose is awful and it’s totally car dependent. I’m very glad that’s no longer part of my business travel pattern. Other than that, if you’re declaring it a second city to San Francisco, it easily tops this list out of sheer prosperity. Santa Clara County has been one of the most economically dominant places on the planet for many decades.
As a place to visit, I’d put Baltimore at the top. Easy access from BWI. The inner harbor is gentrified. I fly down occasionally to catch a Red Sox game. Airfare, hotel, and tickets is cheaper than Fenway tickets from an online scalper and parking and the seats aren’t designed for Hobbits. I can ignore that the rest of the city is a vast slum other than Johns Hopkins.
Despite the MSA, Baltimore is a primary city in many ways. It's just close enough to DC to get folded in.
Oakland for tourism...mostly because it's an easy train or ferry ride to San Francisco proper. I've taken a train from DC to Baltimore but it takes a while.
I live in the Bay Area and have been all around San Jose & Oakland. I’ve visited Dallas & Fort Worth numerous times. My pick is Baltimore. I’ve visited DC numerous times, but don’t know much about Baltimore.
Baltimore is the only mostly-independent city here. The San Francisco area cities are all part of the same pot. Oakland is in the easy-commute range, and SJ's economy is centered in an area shared with SF.
Location: That star on your map in the middle of the East Coast, DMV
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Originally Posted by AshbyQuin
It really shouldn't; San Jose and San Francisco are two completely different cities, and like Baltimore, San Jose is its own separate Metro.
Yea, but all of that is pretty moot with regards to the OP. The point being made by the person that opened this thread 11 years ago, is that regardless of us going back and forth in C-D world by metro definitions, the cities being mentioned are not the principle city in their greater region at least by perception. All of them are 50 miles or less to the primary tourist draw city, and therefore a comparison is being asked to be made here. Who all cares about this metro designation stuff in real life? Really? These threads get thrown off so easily because people want to debate the same silly designations over and over. Two of these places literally have combined airport names using both of their local cities names. Let's stop living in the abyss here like there's no merit for asking the question.
You fly into anyone one of these three regions airports (BWI, DFW, OAK, or SFO), which city would you rather tour, assuming you're not going to the other big city in the region? Which would you rather spend time in, stay overnight, enjoy nightlife, walk around and take photos etc.? It's really a simple as that.
Going by that criteria I imagine the average person would say Baltimore and then Oakland. San Jose and Ft Worth simply are less appealing to out of state or out of towners than the other two.
Last edited by the resident09; 10-08-2021 at 02:42 PM..
Ur cool, it gets annoying tho that people (especially on this site) keep joining Baltimore and DC. if people spend time here they would realize that DC is never even thought about in Baltimore. IDGAF what the census say, they are the same agency that still labels MD as a southern state, when it never really was to begin with.
DMV = DC-Maryland-Virginia region is the strictly the DC area... thats not us.
When I talked to people in Baltimore, they told me that when going to DC, they call it “going to the city”.
Location: That star on your map in the middle of the East Coast, DMV
8,131 posts, read 7,581,348 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by UrbanQuest
When I talked to people in Baltimore, they told me that when going to DC, they call it “going to the city”.
That's more so in the DC suburbs of MD..."Da City".
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