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TBH I just go with CSA if it's west of the Great Plains and MSA otherwise. With a few areas I know well (Seattle, Portland, Reno etc.) I may have more specific opinions.
Urban areas are pretty much useless to me, with how arbitrarily split up they are.
Yeah at least for the census urban areas.
I thought about it more, and from now on out I'll use Demographia's urban areas (and combine some if needed in my head) and CSA to determine the "greater city region", including on the East Coast.
Demographia seems to keep all the urban areas together in North America. It is really only the UK where some are separated (and Zurich in Switzerland).
MSAs in the post-covid era are relatively arbitrary at defining a city region, as so many people work from home these days and don't commute from the hinterlands.
Atlanta Urban area is about 5M...add in places like Winder and Cartersville (and Monroe and Woodmont) you get to 5.2M or so. Gainesville (which is separated for no reason IMHO...but it's also a separate MSA) is 265k, so adding everything together you're at about 5.4M-5.5M, which sounds about right. Atlanta area is definitely larger than 4.26M from above, but not quite 6.2M as the MSA stated.
Demographia has all the US urban areas combined if they are in a CSA and if they touch. Atlanta's includes Winder and Gainesville and is about 5.5 million, so your calculations are correct.
Raleigh's county is a bit more than half of the entire CSA population (new CSA). The other 9 counties combined make up the rest. In any other CSA, that would be more than enough to make Raleigh the de facto CSA namesake. The population and growth in the Triangle is not equally distributed. It's increasingly centered around Raleigh.
Raleigh does not have enough dominance over the region for that honor. Durham is too large and doesn't rely on Raleigh for economic viability. That's why the Raleigh-Durham MSA was split and remains so even today. 80% of the Research Triangle Park is in Durham county. And the main education centers (Duke, UNC & NC Central) are in the Durham-Chapel MSA and is considered the most educated area of the Triangle.
New Orleans dropped a full 10 spots in the MSA rankings. Never thought I’d see the day where NOLA becomes a peer city to Omaha. They’ve essentially accelerated a couple decades worth of population decline. Has a change this dramatic occurred in recent times? I can’t think of one example since I started following this stuff in the 2000s.
Btw, I love your position on the fraud metros. Thank you for continuing to call them out
New Orleans the year after Katrina. It dropped to like 256k in the city proper.
Raleigh's county is a bit more than half of the entire CSA population (new CSA). The other 9 counties combined make up the rest. In any other CSA, that would be more than enough to make Raleigh the de facto CSA namesake. The population and growth in the Triangle is not equally distributed. It's increasingly centered around Raleigh.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mackro70
Raleigh does not have enough dominance over the region for that honor. Durham is too large and doesn't rely on Raleigh for economic viability. That's why the Raleigh-Durham MSA was split and remains so even today. 80% of the Research Triangle Park is in Durham county. And the main education centers (Duke, UNC & NC Central) are in the Durham-Chapel MSA and is considered the most educated area of the Triangle.
You're both (kind of) right...but also letting your " team Raleigh v team Durham" biases keep you from the whole picture....
Wake is the dominant county in population and growing at a much higher rate; Durham/Orange punch WELL above their weight for their population in the employment concentration and other economic indicators (educational attainment etc) ; mostly because 2 of the three "points" are there as well as the majority of RTP.
Raleigh wouldn't be Raleigh without Durham/CH; and Durham/CH wouldn't be Durham/CH without Raleigh. RTP wouldn't be where it is where it not for Raleigh, Durham, and CH and their respective universities.
Wake's population and economic activity is heavily lopsided to the North and West of the county because those areas are closer to Durham/CH/RTP (For all intents and purposes Cary, Morrisville and arguably Apex are just as much "suburbs" of Durham as they are of Raleigh).... Ditto Durham being lopsided to the South for being more proximate to Raleigh/Wake; and to a more subtle but still notable degree; Chapel Hill "favors" South/East ala proximity to Durham and Raleigh.
All of this is why I personally view the Triangle as one dynamic yet cohesive multi-nodal metro area. A little silly that OMB still disagrees but it is what it is. I grew up in Cary/Apex, went to college and worked/lived in Chapel Hill for a decade, at one point lived in and currently mostly work in Durham, and currently live in NW Raleigh. All a little bit different but all certainly closely tied to one another and very easily interchangeable in day-to-day activities.
Both the Durham Bulls and the Durham Performing Arts Center have a plurality of the season ticket holders (around 40% for both last I saw) come from Wake County residents. Obviously the majority of RTP workers also live in Wake County. For all intents and purposes, Wake and Durham function as a single economic region. It’s a quirk of the formula that the region is not a single MSA.
Raleigh does not have enough dominance over the region for that honor. Durham is too large and doesn't rely on Raleigh for economic viability. That's why the Raleigh-Durham MSA was split and remains so even today. 80% of the Research Triangle Park is in Durham county. And the main education centers (Duke, UNC & NC Central) are in the Durham-Chapel MSA and is considered the most educated area of the Triangle.
I would say yes by the definition the OMB uses that is true Raleigh “deserves” its CSA. But I think that standard is way too Broad. “The Triangle” is a more accurate name like “Southeastern New England” is a more reasonable name for the Boston CSA because it’s Boston-Worcester-Providence-New Bedford-Manchester-Nashua-Barnstable-Concord-Laconia not Boston.
That dataset is going to get even weirder over the 2020s, and OMB is supposed to direct an effort during this decade to evaluate different measures of metropolitan connectivity other than commuting: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/...2021-15159.pdf
Quote:
Originally Posted by btownboss4
It’s just that the census methodology is a poor fit for regions of the country for more than one city. And it’s really bad when you have multi county MSA’s interacting with each other.
There's obviously going to be a lot of discontent with however these are delineated, since no one set of rules makes sense for the entire country -- especially when counties (generally too large, and with boundaries usually set centuries ago) are the only nationally consistent unit of government that exists between states and municipalities. I'm sure we'd all be better off if all the states followed Connecticut's lead and created a more rational set of boundaries.
Yet the insistent cries of "fraud" are excessive. Just because not everywhere is a single, pre-1960 transect of skyscrapers downtown tapering down to bedroom suburbs and then to farmland does not mean that metropolitan ties do not exist in areas with multiple urban centers.
I'm sorry that some people on here think there "it doesn't FEEL right" to combining Washington and Baltimore (even though they're as close as Dallas and Fort Worth!!!), or Frederick and Fredericksburg, but the facts are the facts: there's a lot of inter-county travel for economic purposes around here, and boy do we have the traffic jams to prove it. My husband rotates between offices in DC, Loudoun, and Prince William counties, and we go to Baltimore on most weekends -- and there's no border crossing!
Dallas and Fort Worth rose up together. They helped each other become major.
Baltimore was already major before DC was thought of.
Sure there are factors that helped the 2 surrounding areas to CONTINUE to grow.
Dallas and Fort Worth growing together and becoming major together gives them more common identity. DC and Baltimore are more independent in identity.
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