Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
^ I'm just predisposed to tighter boundaries for these things.
Kenosha certainly shouldn't have been the first county lopped off of the Chicago MSA (hello Jasper and Newton!), But it's still a slimming down nonetheless, which is nice to see for a change.
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Serious question:
How would you build a metro area (on what basis, what thresholds, etc.) which would result in a decent amount of practical differentiation from the underlying urban areas? If a metro area is significantly tighter, then isn’t it just the urban area and what, then, is the point of having metropolitan areas at all?
What about going in the opposite direction? Using census tracts as the geography with commuting patterns as the dataset, these authors (almost) exhaust every single precinct attaching each in an iterative process to a core city. Perhaps this might help to alleviate our urban/rural political divide by including everyone in these calculations and not so single-mindedly focusing on cities vis-a-vis rural areas.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166083
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166083.g005
Maybe having all three is the way to go, using census tracts for all three. Ditch counties altogether and get rid of combined statistical areas, which are useless.
Urban Areas: housing unit density qualifies for inclusion of census tracts;
Metropolitan Areas: Urban Area plus all adjacent census tracts where 25% or more of the residents commute or telecommute into the Urban Area for work every day;
Macropolitan Areas: all census tracts exhausted in an iterative process and attached to one of X metropolitan areas (the largest, perhaps using 1 million as the threshold) using commute and telecommute data, taking care to keep all secondary Urban or Metropolitan Areas whole;
Micropolitan Areas: Maybe even shift the Micropolitan Area term, and refer to all secondary Metropolitan Areas as such. I.E. those that fall within the Macropolitan Area of a more Metropolitan Area.
Rural Areas: I’d even go so far as to say that we need Rural Statistical Areas within the Macropolitan areas, so that our government has the tools and more appropriate regional data to more adequately responds to the needs of our rural citizens.