Quote:
Originally Posted by LMich
Just for some other fun stats, and to add another perspective the sizes of the top 20 most populous CSA (2006) commuter areas as of 2003 (probably haven't changed much since then), taking into account, of course, how small and how large counties are in different states and areas of the country:
- New York City - 11,842 mi²
- Washington/Baltimore: 9,682 mi²
- San Francisco/SanJose - 8,791 mi²
- Seattle/Tacoma - 8,194 mi²
I hope I didn't make any mistakes, and if I can find MSA land area numbers I'll post that, too, but it was hard enough finding the land area of the CSA. I'm not exactly sure if there is a table option, here, where I could add population with area. |
Like I said before, if you superimpose the land mass the constitutes metropolitan Dallas or Atlanta, over places like Detroit and Boston, the Detroit and Boston totals would shoot up by nearly a million folks. Thus, you really have just as many folks living in a given area but are simply not being counted due to the formula used to calculate totals. Hence, it’s not a true comparison.
I am still waiting for someone to tell me the practical functionality of these figures? I know that in regards to cities, money is often allocated from the State based upon the size of the city. I am wondering just how much politics is involved in these rankings given that the methodology is born from the federal governments Office of Management and Budget I believe.
I think a better methodology is to simply do a 100-mile radius from every core city and do a head count. The problem with that methodology, of course, is that the circle would truncate part of county totals and thus there would be no way to isolate and count the portion that intersects with the circle. However, a given radius would give a much better indication of how populated an area is than the methodology of commuting patterns.