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People will go into all kinds of contortions to explain how San Francisco and San Jose are one contiguous area while ignoring the fact that San Diego and Tijuana are literally backed up against each other.
There really is only one answer: you have to completely ignore any area that is designated and given an actual border for discussing what composes a true metro area. A metro area does not have defined borders.
A state is not organic; its lines are totally arbitrary. A city tends to be organic. It is a real place and its limits define a jurisdiction. Cities tend to keep their name (and definitely keep their place) as the land they are on shifts from one nation/society to another. Rome, Italy, is the same city that once was Rome, Roman Republic.
Metropolitan areas are totally organic. A state may keep its same footprint forever. A city may grow as it spreads but at some point is locked in and no longer can spread.
A metro area cannot even exist if it does not have the ability to expand or contract. Does the metro area "exist". Sure. In that very organic sense. Can you truly capture it? No. But you do your best by trying to place the most reasonable arbitrary lines around it.
So you are right.
If the provence of Ontario thought, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if all five Great Lakes were in the US" and joined the US, is there any question that as soon as the ink dried on that contract that Detroit and Windsor would officially become the Detroit/Windsor Metropolitan Area while the Niagara River becomes a state line?
The question concerned large cities not in the same metropolitan area. Neither of those meets that criterion.
Baltimore-Washington is already a single CSA. San Diego and Tijuana are separated by an international border and therefore are not; the designation of a San Diego-Tijuana metropolis is simply informal and even more loosely defined than Baltimore-Washington.
Baltimore-Washington also has very geographically continuous sprawl indistinguishable from the continuous development between San Diego and Tijuana.
So everyone is voting Baltimore-Washington simply because of geographical proximity rather than actual cultural similarity. If so, San Diego-Tijuana would be an equally convincing combo.
Baltimore-Washington is already a single CSA. San Diego and Tijuana are separated by an international border and therefore are not; the designation of a San Diego-Tijuana metropolis is simply informal and even more loosely defined than Baltimore-Washington.
Baltimore-Washington also has very geographically continuous sprawl indistinguishable from the continuous development between San Diego and Tijuana.
So everyone is voting Baltimore-Washington simply because of geographical proximity rather than actual cultural similarity. If so, San Diego-Tijuana would be an equally convincing combo.
Point taken, sort of.
The "sort of" part:
I recently had a friend comment to me about a wildly popular San Antonio-based supermarket chain that dominates Texas but also operates 60 stores in Mexico that its management realized that "the Rio Grande was just a political border."
Similarly, recall that among those murdered by that white supremacist in El Paso were 7 Mexican nationals who routinely crossed the Rio Grande to shop at the Walmart in question. Near the Walmart and the shopping center is a 1960s shopping center on the Mexican side of the river that gets patronage from Texas customers too.
Thus the only thing that keeps these places from becoming *statistical* metropolitan areas is the presence of the international border. *Economically and functionally*, they already are single metropolises. San Diego and Tijuana, or Detroit and Windsor, same thing.
The connections that drive the votes, however, are indeed economic and geospatial, not cultural. Hence my comments about LA and San Diego.
Edited to add: Wait, or am I merely reinforcing your point? Why would Baltimore and Washington be considered separate if San Francisco and San Jose are not? The only reason I can think of is historical: Both Baltimore and Washington were distinct metropolitan centers for more than a century, and up until the 1960s, Baltimore was the bigger and more important of the two. The decline of manufacturing is what has drawn metropolitan Baltimore into Greater Washington's orbit.
True all the airports in the NEC draw people from the various metros. But BWI serves pretty much all of Maryland and much of the DMV. 1/3 of the airports passengers are DC metro area residents.
Baltimore-Washington is already a single CSA. San Diego and Tijuana are separated by an international border and therefore are not; the designation of a San Diego-Tijuana metropolis is simply informal and even more loosely defined than Baltimore-Washington.
Baltimore-Washington also has very geographically continuous sprawl indistinguishable from the continuous development between San Diego and Tijuana.
So everyone is voting Baltimore-Washington simply because of geographical proximity rather than actual cultural similarity. If so, San Diego-Tijuana would be an equally convincing combo.
Baltimore and DC function more independently than SF-SJ.
Location: That star on your map in the middle of the East Coast, DMV
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kidphilly
I was talking mainly about Bucks and Burlington county which are about 60 minutes to EWR and 45 to PHL
Yea I feel you. Like I said there's a lot of people who use the airports available throughout the NEC. I've flown out of JFK myself even coming up from the DC area.
It's just a lot more closely related in DC-Baltimore. Heck Reagan and BWI aiports themselves are 36 miles from each other, and there's nothing but city and suburbs in between.
Baltimore and DC function more independently than SF-SJ.
Exactly. Which is why I see a stronger case for SF-SJ than Baltimore and DC, having been to all four cities.
Guess what? Baltimore and DC are not in the same MSA, but they are in the same CSA.
Same with SF and SJ. They're in the same CSA, but they're not even in the same MSA!
I say either we exclude two cities in the same CSA from this thread (disqualifying DC-Baltimore), or we keep the thread as it is now: include city pairings that are in the same CSA but in different MSAs.
Then there's this talk of how "Baltimore and DC are geographically closest to each other out of all these cities." True, but if as-the-crow-flies distance is THE main factor in determining a close relationship, why even debate? Why even have this thread? Just take out Google maps and measure the distance between all these city pairs, and look at hard, quantitative, objective data. It makes no sense to debate facts and hard numbers.
In summary:
--SF-SJ have the same situation as DC-Baltimore: same CSA, different MSA, so SF-SJ should be discussed.
--Geographical distance should NOT be a big factor in this discussion. Geographical distance is a hard, quantitative, numeric fact. You can debate opinions, but there's no point in debating facts.
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