Quote:
Originally Posted by Obadno
Yes there are a number of oddities in the way we calculate MSA's and CSA's
Some cities like the bay area and LA you should count them as their CSA's splitting off riverside and San Jose is just stupid.
But other cities like NYC its' CSA includes Philly, and even if economically Philly is a hard satellite of NYC I dont think anyone would consider Philly to be "part of" NYC like Riverside or San Jose are to LA and the Bay.
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They do it by commuting patterns across counties, which is rather dumb because the county is the most arbitrary way of looking at things.
San Jose has its own MSA, but it is part of the overall 9 county Bay Area CSA. It's 50 miles from downtown SJ to the SF terminus (at least on Caltrain), crossing three counties and two MSAs, which is shorter than Buckeye to Gilbert which is we know is within one MSA and CSA and one county.
The Census just shouldn't use counties to determine metro area sizes--I've long wondered about eg, population density within contiguous blocks of 1000 people per square mile which the Census calls "urbanized."