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There are multiple cities in Los Angeles county that abut core L.A., or come close to it that are denser than Cambridge (Maywood, Cudahy, Huntington Park), and then a pile of cities that are denser than Los Angeles orbiting it. Then you can take a metro rail train with the words "Los Angeles Metro" on it to multiple stations in places like Pasadena, Inglewood, Santa Monica, or Long Beach.
That's not even getting into Philadelphia-Camden or SF-Oakland rail transit time being roughly equal to Boston-Cambridge.
It really is something seeing the expectation of bonus points for having a geographic situation like this.
All of which would be edge cities, but we are not talking about edges cities, we are talking about separate municipals within geographic walking distance of the central CBD
Same time? The Delaware River is over half a mile wide... SF-Oakland are 7 miles (by car). Neither are in any way comparable to Cambridge from a geographic accessibility standpoint whether it be rail or car. People walk to Cambridge from Boston the same way people walk to Brooklyn from Manhattan or Arlington from DC.
Nobodies making "exceptions", in colloquial conversation Cambridge is "part" of Boston for the same reason West Hollywood is "part" of LA despite both officially being their own cities.
If Tijuana was added to San Diego, we'd be looking at an even denser area with 5+ million.
Wouldn't make such a comparison because there's no reason to, but its just one more way of illustrating how not-special Boston is.
Roughly the same.
Boston has 1.7 million people in ~200 sq/mi vs. SD's 1.3 million in 326 sq/mi. The difference being that Boston (like all east coast cities) aren't built like a post war sunbelt cities that have the bulk for their population in what is effectively gridded suburbs vice a central historic core.
Boston goes from hyper dense high/mid-rises & tripple deckers to wooded col-de-sac's in the span of a few miles, where as SD is essentially nothing but uniform dense gridded SFH's outside of downtown until you hit mountains.
But if population was the end all to be all, London wouldn't be ranked alongside NYC/Tokyo as the premier global city.
Yup. I think that's why many on C-D like to use "urbanized area" or "urban area" figures to compare populations and population densities.
The county-based MSA figures for both take in lots of farms and fields in many states, especially west of the Mississippi. No place in the United States illustrates this point better than San Bernardino, Calif., an MSA within the Los Angeles CSA. San Bernardino's MSA takes in all of its eponymous county, which stretches all the way to the Arizona border from just 15 miles east of downtown LA. Just about all of the county's population is crammed into its southwestern tip, which is where you will find San Bernardino itself.
I would, however, that border cities' metropolitan areas should include cities in the neighboring country, especially as in just about all the cases I'm familiar with (San Diego-Tijuana, the two Nogaleses, El Paso-Juarez, Brownsville-Matamoros, Laredo-Nuevo Laredo, Niagara Falls-Fort Erie, Detroit-Windsor) significant commercial trade takes place across the international border, and a good number of people cross it to work as well. I believe there's a small town pair on the Vermont-Québec border whose public library straddles it and whose main street, Canusa Avenue, is the border itself before it veers northward into Québec (it's signed as a Québec provincial highway).
Even using the MSA/county scale, Boston isn't denser than Los Angeles. Urban area to me seems like the obvious choice as it looks the most precise. For example, Santa Clarita is excluded from L.A.'s UA (even though there is certainly a high volume of work commuting into L.A.) while Ontario and Rancho Cucamonga are included because its measuring unbroken urban tracts. So even though there's only like a four mile break between L.A. and Santa Clarita, UA is a precise enough tally to not include it.
In the case of Los Angeles, you get about 12 million people at a population density roughly equivalent to the city of Baltimore.
I've noticed the preferred method around here to define Los Angeles is to use CSA, as that drags in the entirety of county (Death Valley is just another L.A. neighborhood!) which plays nicely into the popular surburb/sprawl narrative.
The funny thing is that metro Boston's geographically smaller counties don't help it in this, as L.A. is still denser on a MSA level which includes the Antelope Valley.
The international MSA is an interesting one that certainly could be investigated further. If someone went down that path, they might find the same or more interchange that meets census standards of a population area than between MSA cities in the interior of the country.
Keeping this in line with the discussion taking place over the last few pages, you can see there's reason to be wary of someone insisting on using measurement over another.
All of which would be edge cities, but we are not talking about edges cities, we are talking about separate municipals within geographic walking distance of the central CBD
Same time? The Delaware River is over half a mile wide... SF-Oakland are 7 miles (by car). Neither are in any way comparable to Cambridge from a geographic accessibility standpoint whether it be rail or car. People walk to Cambridge from Boston the same way people walk to Brooklyn from Manhattan or Arlington from DC.
Nobodies making "exceptions", in colloquial conversation Cambridge is "part" of Boston for the same reason West Hollywood is "part" of LA despite both officially being their own cities.
I replied to your post which indicated Los Angeles had "annexed its inner ring suburbs", which has not ever occurred to my knowledge. I suggested a few pages back that Beverly Hills could be a reasonable answer to Cambridge as there will be multiple subway stations there.
If I remember correctly, "downtown to downtown" was being discussed for Cambridge/Boston a few pages ago. That's what I went by transit to calculate MBTA travel time (DT crossing to Kendall/MIT), which is about the same using BART from the equivalent areas (12th street Oak to Embarcadero in SF and Oakland (and in a few years from DTLA to Beverly Hills).
The difference between MBTA and BART in those trips? A whopping two minutes in Boston's favor.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BostonBornMassMade
Its even a little more than that at some points.
Take the Museum of Science- its in the Cambridge/Boston land border. Half of it is Boston. Half is in Cambridge.
This is Cambridge (even though its showing as "Boston" in the top right corner)
I was using downtown (Kendall Square to be precise) to Boston's CBD as was being discussed earlier in my transit calculation, not the narrowest part of the river from shore to shore or where they border each other.
Google navigation shows Kendall Square to downtown Boston as a 45 minute walk. I can walk from DTLA to Koreatown in that time.
Thank you for posting these map links though, now I know that I can simply "put this whole town in my rearview" and walk right from Charlestown into East Cambridge, if that situation ever pops up in my life.
Last edited by Losfrisco; 12-03-2023 at 08:47 PM..
I replied to your post which indicated Los Angeles had "annexed its inner ring suburbs", which has not ever occurred to my knowledge. I suggested a few pages back that Beverly Hills could be a reasonable answer to Cambridge as there will be multiple subway stations there.
If I remember correctly, "downtown to downtown" was being discussed for Cambridge/Boston a few pages ago. That's what I went transit by to calculate MBTA travel time (DT crossing to Kendall/MIT), which is about the same using BART from the equivalent areas (12th street Oak to Embarcadero in SF and Oakland (and in a few years from DTLA to Beverly Hills).
The difference between MBTA and BART in those trips? A whopping two minutes in Boston's favor.
I was using downtown (Kendall Square to be precise) to Boston's CBD as was being discussed earlier in my transit calculation, not the narrowest part of the river from shore to shore or where they border each other.
Google navigation shows Kendall Square to downtown Boston as a 45 minute walk. I can walk from DTLA to Koreatown in that time.
Thank you for posting these map links though, now I know that I can simply "put this whole town in my rearview" and walk right from Charlestown into East Cambridge, if that situation ever pops up in my life.
Not that it matters to you, but Park Street, not DTX is the inbound/outbound demarcation point for the Red Line.
But if you insist. Chicago has much less influence outside its borders than Boston, as Boston has a greater number of intercity commuters than Chicago.
Why as a major city does Chicago fail to attract suburban commuters? In fact according to City-data, Boston has over 3x the inbound flow of commuters Chicago has.
Not that it matters to you, but Park Street, not DTX is the inbound/outbound demarcation point for the Red Line.
But if you insist. Chicago has much less influence outside its borders than Boston, as Boston has a greater number of intercity commuters than Chicago.
Why as a major city does Chicago fail to attract suburban commuters? In fact according to City-data, Boston has over 3x the inbound flow of commuters Chicago has.
Can't think of what could be backing this up, as Chicago leads Boston in both commuter rail and Amtrak traffic.
What does it say when Chicago's Union Station beats Boston's top two combined Amtrak stations in total passengers?
I guess having access to the superior ACELA rail corridor didn't help Boston that much! Seems like that should have been an easy layup for Boston.
Can't think of what could be backing this up, as Chicago leads Boston in both commuter rail and Amtrak traffic.
What does it say when Chicago's Union Station beats Boston's top two combined Amtrak stations in total passengers?
I guess having access to the superior ACELA rail corridor didn't help Boston that much! Seems like that should have been an easy layup for Boston.
Because all of Boston’s rapid Transit lines extend beyond the city? The Red Line Ferries like 70,000 people over the Charles. The Orange line and blue line well over 100,000 into Boston from the Northern Suburbs. The 11 Bis alone makes up the about 1/2 the gap between METRA and MBTA commuter rail. That more than makes up for a few hundred extra Amtrak passengers per day Chicago Union station gets over North South and Back Bay
Heck a lot of Brookline Village people walk to work at Longwood.
Even using the MSA/county scale, Boston isn't denser than Los Angeles. Urban area to me seems like the obvious choice as it looks the most precise. For example, Santa Clarita is excluded from L.A.'s UA (even though there is certainly a high volume of work commuting into L.A.) while Ontario and Rancho Cucamonga are included because its measuring unbroken urban tracts. So even though there's only like a four mile break between L.A. and Santa Clarita, UA is a precise enough tally to not include it.
In the case of Los Angeles, you get about 12 million people at a population density roughly equivalent to the city of Baltimore.
I've noticed the preferred method around here to define Los Angeles is to use CSA, as that drags in the entirety of county (Death Valley is just another L.A. neighborhood!) which plays nicely into the popular surburb/sprawl narrative.
The funny thing is that metro Boston's geographically smaller counties don't help it in this, as L.A. is still denser on a MSA level which includes the Antelope Valley.
The international MSA is an interesting one that certainly could be investigated further. If someone went down that path, they might find the same or more interchange that meets census standards of a population area than between MSA cities in the interior of the country.
Keeping this in line with the discussion taking place over the last few pages, you can see there's reason to be wary of someone insisting on using measurement over another.
I'm not going to dispute that last sentence, but did you see my subsequent post about Lee's Summit, Mo.? If you look at the map, it should definitely be in the Kansas City UA, but it isn't.
Also: Keep in mind that in the six New England states, where counties are vestigial at best, the basic unit for forming metropolitan areas is the town or city. That means that the UA and the MSA of most New England MSAs are closer to identical. There are New England County Metropolitan Areas used for comparison purposes with the rest of the country, but the level one looks at in that part of the country is really the municipality (there's no such thing as unincorporated areas in New England. Actually, the same applies to New York State, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where the town (NYS) or township (the other two) is a municipality as well0.
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