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Mobile-Daphne isn't going to happen unfortunately. The population is largely growing because of retirees and Boomers, so as the population grows, the commuter interchange with Mobile keeps dropping since a smaller proportion of the population is crossing the bridge.
Well actually the commuter rate is going up, it was 20% ish in the 2000’s and early 2010’s but it’s climbed back to the 25% range
Retirees are a big part of Baldwin County’s growth but luckily they don’t directly contribute to commuters patterns
Neither. The formula is very cryptic and complex. It would be Wake/Johnson vs. Cumberland/Hoke (the "core counties" of each MSA). Then you'd take Harnett County and compare it's commuting to both of these cores by using their "employment interchange measure" formula). But that data all gets posted here (usually well after the bulletin goes out: https://www.census.gov/topics/employ...nce/flows.html) so we're flying blind.
And beforehand, you'd have to determine whether Harnett is sufficiently tied to Fayetteville to become a core county (in which case it getting poached is far harder).
But it's far more complex than just Wake/Cumberland. Otherwise Harnett would have been in Wake County's sphere long ago. Here's commuting from Harnett to either Cumberland or Wake:
2002: 21.5% Wake vs. 9.5% Cumberland
2005: 20.6% vs. 10.9%
2010: 21.7% vs. 12.9%
2015: 24.5% vs. 12.9%
2020: 25.9% vs. 11.2%
As you can see, commuting to Wake has always been higher than to Cumberland yet Harnett was added to Fayetteville's MSA.
So I don't really focus on the %, but use OnTheMap to see the scale of the shift in commuting. And then looked at the 2002-2013 trends and compared to the 2013 delineation to reverse engineer it a bit and see when shifts happen.
And OnTheMap makes it easy to look at commuting to different metros. Hence why Harnett/Cumberland were bundled. But it's all a fuzzy art, definitely not a science. All we can really determine is that as time goes on, Harnett is drifting further into Raleigh's sphere. And when a county commutes to another MSA more than to its own (even when you include intra-county commuters), that's usually a red flag tipping point.
Thanks. Harnett was in Raleigh’s CSA prior to 2020, when it moved to Fayetteville. Curious to see what the future holds with 540 pulling in Angier into it’s orbit.
1. Raleigh and Durham to combine to one singular MSA
2. Give Mercer back to Philadelphia CSA. But probably wont happen since NJ Transit commutes a lot of people.
3. Worcester County to Boston MSA. The commuting levels are extremely high now.
4. With CT redrawing, putting Western CT into New York MSA would make sense. Then Greater Bridgeport into CSA. Definitely not any former Litchfield County areas... that never made any sense whatsoever.
The only one I'll predict with a level of confidence is the Raleigh-Durham merger into a singular MSA ... though I thought it would have been combined in 2013 and it wasn't. If combined, it will be interested to see if any other counties are also absorbed and what it does for the CSA (is Greensboro/Winston-Salem added?).
I'll need to see it before I believe it on Cleveland-Akron being combined (a lot of old guard political power, specifically from Akron/Summit County that fought against it when MSAs were originally created and have continued to push back against being "lumped in" with Cleveland), so this isn't a prediction. But Cuyahoga-Summit have now met the two-way 25 percent commuting threshold every year since 2013.
With that, the timing of this is interesting ... At the beginning of June, Akron METRO and Greater Cleveland RTA unveiled a further partnership with Metro adding two fixed routes (6 days a week with either 30 to 60 minute service) from downtown Akron through the northern Summit burbs to the GCRTA Southgate transfer center. GCRTA riders can also transfer to the Metro routes into Summit County from Southgate as well. Metro has a Northcoast Express route to Cleveland/University Circle and all the local transit systems have accepted each other's transfers for years, but this is the first streamlined local route between GCRTA/Metro. Obviously, that doesn't mean the two will be combined into a single MSA, but it further adds to the connectivity between the two cities.
I think if Raleigh-Durham were re-merged (and at the moment I don’t see it), the county to watch would be Alamance (175,000 pop) flipping from the Triad CSA to the Triangle CSA. It’s commuting has steadily and decisively shifted east, but Durham/Wake split has kept it in the Greensboro camp for now.
I think if Raleigh-Durham were re-merged (and at the moment I don’t see it), the county to watch would be Alamance (175,000 pop) flipping from the Triad CSA to the Triangle CSA. It’s commuting has steadily and decisively shifted east, but Durham/Wake split has kept it in the Greensboro camp for now.
If the Triangle was reassembled into one MSA (not holding my breath), I agree that Alamance County is ripe for the picking. I'd also suspect that both Harnett and Lee counties would be as well.
I am really surprised Port Townsend, WA (Jefferson Co.) still isn't a micropolitan area. City pop. is 10,388 as of 2022 and rising, and usually unincorporated areas around the core city can add to the "urban area" total. I guess the population is a bit too spread-out, and the city limits are rather large, so it's not actually all one UA? It definitely feels micropolitan because of how built-up and lively the downtown is.
Raleigh-Durham's MSA should be one, DC and Baltimore's MSAs need to remain separate.
SF-San Jose are one greater area. You can also be near the Tesla plant in Fremont, which is the SF MSA, and be five miles from the San Jose city line. It's the same tech economy in both places with the same heavy rail system and the same media market.
NYC will be interesting. Due to county boundaries, the CSA currently extends to Madison, Connecticut, nearly 100 miles from midtown Manhattan. LA is even more absurd going to the Nevada line. With modern mapping, GIS, etc, it's beyond me why they don't redefine MSAs/CSAs by zip codes instead of overstretched county boundaries.
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