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If I understand the question right (and maybe I didn't?), we might mostly be looking at areas with a big delta in CSA rank vs MSA rank:
1) Bay Area
2) Boston - Providence
3) DC/Baltimore
4) RDU + RTP
5) Orlando - huge tourist area inflating the active population, CSA over 4M. Anchor to central FL
6) Knoxville - college town but also gateway to the smokey mountains
7) Myrtle Beach/Grand Strand - huge tourist areas, spans 2 states.
Yeah. To me Cleveland still "feels" like the biggest metro area in Ohio despite no longer being as such.
The only people who think Cleveland is smaller than Columbus or Cincy are those who just look at MSA population alone (I'll add Pittsburgh to that as well). Cleveland is only 5 counties and less than 2,000 sqare miles and is still nearly 2.1 million. Columbus and Cincy are only about 100,000 and 200,000 more, respectively, and both are about 3 times in land area and gobble up a bunch of rural counties into their "metro" areas.
I'll take it a step further and say that Cleveland is still the biggest "city" of the three if you take away municipal boundaries and go by contiguous population density.
Cleveland can go to 1.4 million in contiguous census tracts of 2,000 ppsm or above. Columbus is about 1.2 million and Cincy about 900k. ... Pittsburgh is about 800k there.
Neither one of those takes Summit/Portage counties (Akron) into account for Cleveland either.
I noticed that Syracuse had a population of a little over 1.24 million within 50 mile radius of the city and it economic area population was around 2 million between the two maps.
Another city that comes to mind is Harrisburg, where its CSA has about 1.3 million people.
Granted that both have other city centers that are of a similar to small city population, but both seem to be the main city in terms of media influence and other aspects(major shopping center, sports, etc).
So, are there other cities that are similar in this regard where other criteria can illustrate a bigger influence than the metro area portrays?
There's no discussion of what you're talking about here.
Sioux Falls has a metro population of 282K, but due to isolation it serves as the cultural/medical/regional hub for a huge area. Weekends get backed up through stop lights and restaurants get 2 hour wait times. It can have the feel of a 600-800K city at times, perhaps not unlike a Des Moines, Madison, etc.
Sioux Falls has a metro population of 282K, but due to isolation it serves as the cultural/medical/regional hub for a huge area. Weekends get backed up through stop lights and restaurants get 2 hour wait times. It can have the feel of a 600-800K city at times, perhaps not unlike a Des Moines, Madison, etc.
Billings also seems bigger than 187k, seems easily double that.
I’m thinking more about an independent city that doesn’t get to feed off of a much bigger city, if that makes sense.
In that case, it's tough to go with any city on/near the Great Lakes because it's hard to go from Upstate NY to Milwaukee without city/metros rubbing elbows with each other (and that goes into Ontario).
Most of the examples posted so far are of metros that are bigger in reality than their MSA/CSA populations imply. I'll give an example of one metro that's the opposite: Bakersfield, CA. Kern County's massive land area means it includes towns like Tehachapi, California City, and Ridgecrest whose connection to Bako is tenuous, beyond maybe being the nearest major hospital or mall. MSA population is 909k; effectively it's maybe two-thirds that.
Most of the examples posted so far are of metros that are bigger in reality than their MSA/CSA populations imply. I'll give an example of one metro that's the opposite: Bakersfield, CA. Kern County's massive land area means it includes towns like Tehachapi, California City, and Ridgecrest whose connection to Bako is tenuous, beyond maybe being the nearest major hospital or mall. MSA population is 909k; effectively it's maybe two-thirds that.
Grand Rapids is similar in that regard. It's immediate urbanized area is only about 700k people, but there are nearly 1.7 million people within a 50 mile radius. 2.2 million if you expand that to 60 miles.
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