How much a city can grow?

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by kittyhawk28

Of course, that was beside my point, which was that since both NY and Philly or LA and San Diego developed separately, their centers of gravity simply are not intertwined in the way dual-core metropolitan areas are, no matter how much you improve transit connections between them. Just because I can hop on a bullet train that comes every 3 minutes into Osaka from Tokyo for a business meeting and be back by dinner, doesn't mean the corridor between Tokyo or Osaka should be considered a single metro.

I find that Northeasterners in particular have this kind of mentality of conflating a megalopolis with a metropolitan area (maybe due to a desire to fulfill a superiority complex?). And that's what the term megalopolis is actually supposed mean re: NY + Philly or LA + SD; that is, deeply linked cities who share relationships far more than a typical intercity relationship, but aren't exactly cohesively linked enough to be considered one.

I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I'm saying that to the person who lives in central New Jersey, the distinction is arbitrary. It's not about whether someone in Brooklyn feels like they live in the same city as someone in West Philadelphia. There are tons of people living in central Jersey that commute to NYC while their spouses commute to Philadelphia.