Great Lakes Cities

[suburbanite]

The perspective threw me off there. Thought Pittsburgh was Akron and was wondering how the hell it was so bright.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by suburbanite

The perspective threw me off there. Thought Pittsburgh was Akron and was wondering how the hell it was so bright.

that confused me as well for a moment.

i always forget how close pittsburgh is to lake erie (just over 100 miles away from the lakeshore at ashtabula).

pittsburgh is actually closer to a great lake than minneapolis or indianapolis are, which doesn't seem like it should be true in my mind's map, but there it is.

it's probably because pittsburgh feels so culturally distinct, tucked up in the appalachians as it is.

[edale]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

here's a cool image of the great lakes from space:

Buffalo looks super small here, too. I guess it's more like its in-state peer of Rochester than Cleveland, which is the city I usually think of as being its closest analogue.

[softee]

Pittsburgh is only a 5 hour drive from Toronto, not far at all.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by edale

Buffalo looks super small here, too. I guess it's more like its in-state peer of Rochester than Cleveland, which is the city I usually think of as being its closest analogue.

MSA (2018):

cleveland - 2,057,009
buffalo - 1,130,152
rochester - 1,071,082



Urban Area (2010):

cleveland - 1,780,673
buffalo - 935,906
rochester - 720,572


from a size perspective, buffalo is certainly much closer to rochester than it is to cleveland, but i too tend to think of buffalo as a significantly bigger deal than rochester, when in reality it's only marginally larger.

i imagine some of that has to do with pro sports (the bills and sabres) raising buffalo's national profile much higher, along with buffalo's larger historical profile as one of the gateway ports to the erie canal.

[suburbanite]

Some rust belt cities also tend to have higher light emissions than you would guess from their population. Given they tended to have a relatively large prewar footprint, and recent sprawl covers a lot of ground that still needs to be lit up by streetlights even if the density is relatively low.

From that picture, you may guess that Erie, Pennsylvania and Hamilton were similar size, despite Hamilton having ~6 times the population.

[Steely Dan]

^ for sure. US cities tend to sprawl way more than canadian ones, at least in the great lakes region. out west, US cities tend to have much sharper edges.

if you showed that image to someone who didn't know anything about north american city sizes, they would assume that detroit is a much bigger city than toronto.

[suburbanite]

Ya Toronto obviously has a ton of sprawl, I think it's just that in terms of light pollution, most sprawl is created equal even though the density can vary highly.

On the Canadian side we don't tend to have much sprawl like this where one development leapfrogs the next over farmland/forest etc. This greatly expands the "light footprint" of Detroit at a lower density.



You're right that Canadian cities seem to much more resemble West Coast American ones with hard lines where suburbs end and rural begins.

[subterranean]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

^ for sure. US cities tend to sprawl way more than canadian ones, at least in the great lakes region. out west, US cities tend to have much sharper edges.

if you showed that image to someone who didn't know anything about north american city sizes, they would assume that detroit was much bigger city than toronto.

They look about the same to me, minus the bottom of the horseshoe. Detroit CSA (inclusive of Windsor) is nearly the same pop. as metro Toronto.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by subterranean

They look about the same to me

then we'll have to agree to disagree, because detroit looks larger than toronto in that imagine to my eye, going by the size of their respective "light blobs".

[The North One]

Originally Posted by suburbanite

On the Canadian side we don't tend to have much sprawl like this where one development leapfrogs the next over farmland/forest etc. This greatly expands the "light footprint" of Detroit at a lower density.

That's not really leapfrogging, those are originally separate cities. South Lyon is an old small town that got caught in sprawl. I don't think Toronto has this same situation where there are endless old small mainstreet towns surrounding it on all sides like Detroit.

[suburbanite]

Originally Posted by The North One

That's not really leapfrogging, those are originally separate cities. South Lyon is an old small town that got caught in sprawl. I don't think Toronto has this same situation where there are endless old small mainstreet towns surrounding it on all sides like Detroit.

I actually meant the stuff between South Lyon and the subdivision on the far right. You still see patches of farmland and forest interlaced with tendrils of low-density res.

Here's an example of an old small mainstreet town bordering Toronto with a pretty clear rural buffer between sprawling Brampton. They may eventually connect, but it's more incremental, block-by-block. If there were snaking subdivisions reaching out to Georgetown, it would just be absorbed into Toronto's light blob.

[softee]

Originally Posted by subterranean

They look about the same to me, minus the bottom of the horseshoe. Detroit CSA (inclusive of Windsor) is nearly the same pop. as metro Toronto.

The Greater Toronto-Hamilton area has over 7.5 million people now, about 2 million more than the Detroit CSA.

[subterranean]

Originally Posted by softee

The Greater Toronto-Hamilton area has over 7.5 million people now, about 2 million more than the Detroit CSA.

I was just going by Wikipedia’s 5.9 million metro figure. No idea what that includes vs doesn’t include. But if you include Metro Windsor into Detroit CSA, you’re easily looking at 5.7 million. So I guess for a place that has essentially nothing in the way of preventing sprawl, their light pollution looks about the same to me.

[Docere]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

yeah, i mentioned that shortlived toronto-rochester ferry on lake ontario.

Rochester barely registers in the minds of Torontonians. I doubt most have ever been there or spent any time there.

Buffalo a bit, because of media, sports, historic ties etc.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Docere

Rochester barely registers in the minds of Torontonians. I doubt most have ever been there or spent any time there.

Buffalo a bit, because of media, sports, historic ties etc.

Buffalo is smaller than popular perception, Rochester bigger. They have almost the exact same population and economy, but Buffalo just registers as a somewhat large city, and Rochester registers as another random Syracuse-type city.

[Razor]

^ Cool Sat image above..Thanks for posting Steely Dan

I have to agree with some posters..Detroit does look larger then Toronto on there if based solely on light..Cleveland looks impressive as well..Chicago is Holy Lite Brite!
Dear Eastern Seaboard. Great Lakes ain't chopped liver.

[Steely Dan]

another cool thing that's clearly on display in that satellite image is the division of resource extraction vs. resource processing between the upper and lower lakes in terms of city development.

lake superior is nearly lost in the darkness, save for a handful of lonely, widely-spaced modest little cities (duluth, thunder bay, sault ste. marie, & marquette).

and upper lake michigan and most of lake huron are pretty sparse on the urban development front as well.

but then you go down into the lower lakes (lower michigan, erie, & ontario) and it's holy light show, batman!

if you want to build a mighty city, you should clearly base its economy on resource processing, not extraction.

[Razor]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

if you want to build a mighty city, you should clearly base its economy on resource processing, not extraction.

That's a good point. Originally hailing from a resource town myself, I've often wondered why something like Duracell batteries never just built a plant right next to the copper refinery, vs having the copper concentrate shipped out by train. Ditto for the Zinc, other base metals etc. I'm sure they have their costs figured out though. Best to ship from all the mines into one place. Processing has always been far away from the extraction it seems. It's not like we would ever see IKEA move into a lumber mill town.ha

[Tom In Chicago]

Cleveland, Akron, Canton and, to a lesser extent, Youngstown all function within the same urban conglomerate of North East Ohio. . . not surprisingly the urban sprawl between these cities has grown into one large light blob as seen from space. . .

. . .