Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I think people here overestimate the importance of the "look at all these cities in a day's drive!" factor. I can't imagine people are going to drive more than 4 hours unless it's a NYC / LA / Chicago type of city.
When I lived in Columbus, OH, which is known to be within a day's drive of most of the US population, I rarely visited cities outside of the 3 hour radius. The only cities I drove to that were >4 hours away were DC and Chicago. Maybe I would have driven to NYC but even that seemed too far and a bit pointless when I could just hop on a plane.
I used to drive from DC to NYC all the time. Was not worth the day trip. Horrible traffic.
Quote:
Originally Posted by whereiend
I'm not 19, I don't need to pile into a minivan and drive 10 hours. I can afford a plane ticket... Austin to Chicago is a two hour flight that is less than $200 round trip. Driving to go camping makes sense, driving 8 hours to a big city with public transit is just poor time management.
I drove from Corpus to Dallas last week. Cost me about 150 in gas, ok, was drivign a gas guzzler. But a round trip ticket isn't much more than that and I can get there in about an hour each way. True, I'd have to rent a car or Uber around but that's ok.
We're talking about driving from Nashville to Lousiville, Indy and Knoxville? Eh, doesn't do much for me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Redlionjr
Atlanta,DFW and Houston are pretty similar in what they offer but I do think Atlanta gives you more access to outdoor recreation. I also think Atlanta has better day trip options than Houston and Dallas which that combine with outdoor recreation scene makes it a tad bit more different. There's also better weather to enjoy outdoor recreation unlike Dallas and Houston.
But Austin and Nashville have all the outdoor recreation 90% of the population needs.
The four-hour threshold is a reasonable one and it does make a difference IMO. The biggest exception to this is probably the beach for both Nashville and Austin residents.
Austin is 3.5 hours from the beach, not sure about Nashville.
Well, it looks like it’s 2 hours and 40 minute flight. Make it closer to 4 hours and 30 min with security checks and baggage handling. Say 20 minutes to the Austin airport. And an hour from O’Hare to downtown. So maybe 6 hours door-to-door. And multiples of the cost for families. It’s certainly plausible that people would just drive at night. But everyone’s different. I just think it should be noted that most people can’t and don’t treat airline service as a fast taxi. It’s a business tool and a luxury for special occasions for the majority of Americans.
It just depends on the occasion. If it's a family vacation, then yeah, driving probably makes the most sense in our hypothetical Austin -> Chicago or Nashville -> Chicago trip. For a group of working adults that have to coordinate their schedules, I just don't see that as realistic. Assuming you're driving during the day, as most people would prefer to, that's basically 2 full days lost to just traveling. Unless everyone is using PTO to take more time off, it wouldn't be worth it to be in Chicago for only one full day (assuming a 3 day holiday weekend).
I do think Nashville is stronger than Austin in terms of trips close by, but proximity to a city 8 hours away is certainly not one of the reasons why.
8-hours is not workable for a weekend trip via car.* On that we are agreed. For a week trip to see family or whatnot, then certainly it becomes more feasible.
*I say that, though I know my parents before kids used to drive both 10 hours up (New Jersey) and down (Disney World) Friday nights only to return Sunday mornings to crash. Humans will adapt to necessity (for vacation say, or a sick parent) when they deem it warranted.
No it won't. Austin is already larger and continues to grow faster.
Unless this is a subjective question regarding a nebulous metric, it isn't going to happen.
The key word though is overtake. It's in the OP.
If we measure overtake to mean something objective like population, then the answer is certainly no.
In fact, if we go back in time, it's Austin that overtook Nashville.
By current MSA boundaries: 1990
Austin: 846,227
Nashville: 1,086,274
2000
Austin: 1,249,763
Nashville: 1,358,992
2010
Austin: 1,716,289
Nashville: 1,646,200
2020
Austin: 2,283,371
Nashville 1,989,519
You can even substitute Nashville's CSA numbers and Austin is still more populated, growing faster and adding more raw numbers consistently. There's zero evidence that this is going to change. Also, for Nashville to overtake Austin, it would have to grow by nearly 300,000 more people than Austin this decade. It's just not going to happen. For that to happen, Nashville would probably have to add ~900,000 this decade while past decades have shown absolute number gains +/-300,000 per decade. For comparison, Austin added 567,000 from 2010 to 2020.
I don't think even think that Nashville will best Austin on absolute growth numbers for this decade alone.
I highly suspect that the end of the decade will have the gap wider in Austin's favor.
The key word though is overtake. It's in the OP.
If we measure overtake to mean something objective like population, then the answer is certainly no.
In fact, if we go back in time, it's Austin that overtook Nashville.
By current MSA boundaries: 1990
Austin: 846,227
Nashville: 1,086,274
2000
Austin: 1,249,763
Nashville: 1,358,992
2010
Austin: 1,716,289
Nashville: 1,646,200
2020
Austin: 2,283,371
Nashville 1,989,519
You can even substitute Nashville's CSA numbers and Austin is still more populated, growing faster and adding more raw numbers consistently. There's zero evidence that this is going to change. Also, for Nashville to overtake Austin, it would have to grow by nearly 300,000 more people than Austin this decade. It's just not going to happen. For that to happen, Nashville would probably have to add ~900,000 this decade while past decades have shown absolute number gains +/-300,000 per decade. For comparison, Austin added 567,000 from 2010 to 2020.
I don't think even think that Nashville will best Austin on absolute growth numbers for this decade alone.
I highly suspect that the end of the decade will have the gap wider in Austin's favor.
I simply meant, Nashville could grow faster as a percent this decade than Austin. In raw numbers. I don’t see Nashville adding more people than Austin and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Austin grow by a good margin over Nashville.
I simply meant, Nashville could grow faster as a percent this decade than Austin. In raw numbers. I don’t see Nashville adding more people than Austin and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Austin grow by a good margin over Nashville.
Gotcha.
The larger Austin gets, the harder it's going to be for it to sustain % growths as high as they have been. Still, it's quite possible that Austin pulls off another astonished decade of high % growth rate through 2030.
Between 2010 and 2020, Nashville's growth rate was 1.9% annually. In that same period, Austin's rate was 2.9%. Austin would have to slow down and Nashville would have to really ramp up to close that gap.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
