Combined, Washington-Baltimore now outsizes Chicago as America’s 3rd largest CSA

[Razor]

I get the pairing of Baltimore and Washington..They are practically hugging each other.
I just find it an odd pairing on paper..You may as well put Pittsburgh next to San Francisco.Two cities with completely different modus operandi's..Ba-Wash must share a lot of the same local culture though.

[EastSideHBG]

Originally Posted by badrunner

Out of the top five Washington-Baltimore is the only one where major population centers are in different media markets. One of them is not like the others. Also, is there an informal moniker for the Washington-Baltimore area that's equivalent to SoCal, Chicagoland, the Bay area or the Tri-state area? You never hear it referred to as a single urban entity.

Maybe the DMV can apply? The "M" does stand for Maryland after all and DC and Baltimore are only 40 miles apart. DMV has been used to refer to the more immediate areas but with the amount of DC folks moving to Baltimore for the cheaper real estate and Baltimore kind of/sort of losing its identity a bit due to what it has gone through over the years this would make sense to me.

[kingkirbythe....]

BWash!

Washmore
Baltington
WaBa
BaWa
BDC
DCB
Chesapeake Bay Area
Metro Maryland
Metro WB

So many choices, and they all sound forced.

[DCReid]

Originally Posted by kingkirbythe....

BWash!

Washmore
Baltington
WaBa
BaWa
BDC
DCB
Chesapeake Bay Area
Metro Maryland
Metro WB

So many choices, and they all sound forced.

DMV remains the best term. Other cities and counties, like Arlington and Bethesda, are just as influential, if not more so than Baltimore, even if they are smaller. Baltimore is not even in the biggest county of MD, and some of the counties of Baltimore have an influx of DC workers looking for exurb bargains (big houses on lots of land with excellent schools but cheaper than Montgomery County). In my years living there I never met someone living in Baltimore and working in DC.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by kingkirbythe....

So many choices, and they all sound forced.

To be fair, "Chicagoland" is a pretty corny and cheesy-sounding name and would seem forced too had it not been in common usage for over a century now.

Sometimes these things just take time to become "normal", and Chicagoland, by virtue of its almost unparalleled mono-centricity, has been a giant singular entity for a MUCH longer period of time than whatever the DC/Baltimore region is now becoming.

[lio45]

Who can argue against “Baltwash”? There’s precedent already (the name of the NE Corridor).

[Yuri]

No need to find bizarre names. Washington-Baltimore might be an hyphenated metro area and as it grows at a very decent pace since ever, they'll be regarded more and more as a single entity.

And eventually Baltimore MSA core will recover making clear we have one metro area with two capital cities.

[montréaliste]

Originally Posted by lio45

Who can argue against “Baltwash”? There’s precedent already (the name of the NE Corridor).

Yes, as long as they don’t call it "Balwash".

[MolsonExport]

Washingbal?
Washingmore?
Baltiwash?
Waltingtore?

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Yuri

Washington-Baltimore might be an hyphenated metro area and as it grows at a very decent pace since ever, they'll be regarded more and more as a single entity.
.

But the mere presence of the hyphenation means that it will never be seen as being as singular of an entity like "Chicagoland".

Something more akin to the polycentric Dallas-Fort Worth "Metroplex" is more likely.

[dc_denizen]

silly. DC and Baltimore are their own cities/urban areas.

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

But the mere presence of the hyphenation means that it will never be seen as being as singular of an entity like "Chicagoland".

Something more akin to the polycentric Dallas-Fort Worth "Metroplex" is more likely.

Well, I know must people do, but I never write "Dallas-Fort Worth" and call this metro area simply "Dallas".

In any case, calling it Dallas or Dallas-Fort Worth, everybody think of them as a single metro area. Let's think of a 13 million people Washington-Baltimore in the future: I guess it might be increasingly regarded as a single metro area.

Personal opinion here: as a fun of Northern cities and I really dislike the lobby that give life to cities built to be capitals, I want Chicago to pick up and Washington to slow.

[kingkirbythe....]

Originally Posted by montréaliste

Yes, as long as they don’t call it "Balwash".

Sorry, this is the only way I will refer to this metro area from now on.

BALWASH FOREVER!

[Steely Dan]

^^ my point was that if the Washington/Baltimore region is ever gonna come to be seen as more of a singular entity, it will need a singular name like "Metroplex" or "Bay Area".

If its name remains hyphenated, then that will always keep the separateness of its two main nodes front and center.

[EastSideHBG]

Dallas to Ft. Worth is 32 miles so that's a pretty fair comparison and I feel a good one, as they both have their own identities but yet still feel as if they are a part of a whole.

Originally Posted by dc_denizen

silly. DC and Baltimore are their own cities/urban areas.

Still, though? I travel to both frequently and they feel more connected and it's only going to continue in that direction.

[craigs]

In addition to the Bay Area and the Metroplex, Minneapolis and St. Paul (which border each other) are consolidated as "The Twin Cities."

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

^^ my point was that if the Washington/Baltimore region is ever gonna come to be seen as more of a singular entity, it will need a singular name like "Metroplex" or "Bay Area".

If its name remains hyphenated, then that will always keep the separateness of its two main nodes front and center.

I see. I also believe they will remain hyphenated specially as I believe Baltimore will boom and gentrify eventually being as an important urban node as Washington. I don't see any other name catching. The ones suggested above all sound ugly.

I only disagree the hyphen prevents one area to be understand as a single entity in some contexts. Outside the US, Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto is always understood as a single one, specially when they're compared to Tokyo.

[Quixote]

Originally Posted by westak

DC-Baltimore is just two metros that border each other while Chicago(whether MSA/CSA) is about Chicago as the center of that region. Baltimore and DC feel like two seperate cities and imho don't feel combined in a lived out/cultural sense.

This is kind of it. There's a bit of a similar dynamic with Boston-Providence and SF-SJ.

The I-95 corridor linking Boston and Providence is lined with mostly sparsely populated bedroom communities and forest preserves, while the peninsula connecting SF and SJ is contiguous suburban sprawl. Driving distance-wise, both are about 50 miles apart.

But Providence has never in its history been larger or wielded more influence than Boston. In the Bay Area however, SJ is larger in population (with a comparable population to SF by 1980), has its own pro sports team, its own international airport, a CSU, and of course is the global capital of the tech industry. When looking at Google Maps, SJ is given the same prominence (dot and font size) as SF.

Meanwhile, DC and Baltimore are closer (38 miles), connected by Acela and many more highways. You have Prince George's County sharing a substantial border with DC to the south and Anne Arundel County to the east. Baltimore city and County give the Baltimore metro a slight northern tilt, although Anne Arundel County (second most populous suburban county) is where BWI, Fort Meade, and Annapolis are located.

There's really no other comp where you have two separate and distinct legacy cities merging together, with the far more important (though not always) one being the younger of the two and having always trailed the older one in population (until the 2020 census).

FYI, if you take the DC-leaning counties included as part of the CSA and added them to DC's MSA count, you'd have a population of approximately 6.6 million people. I think that number more closely aligns with how we perceive DC in terms of size.

[Quixote]

Originally Posted by tablemtn

They are disconnected because they are physically disconnected. It simply doesn't matter how many people travel between the areas each day. As a thought experiment, imagine if all of Omaha's population traveled to LA every day on some kind of futuristic airship, and millions in LA made the opposite trip. LA and Omaha would still not be part of the same contiguous metro area.

Lancaster and Palmdale aren't to LA County what, say, Barstow (a podunk town you stop by when driving between LA and Vegas), is to San Bernardino County. The Antelope Valley should be included and not written off as some outlier because they are exurban communities with transportation infrastructure linking the two.

Staten Island is disconnected from the rest of NYC (physically and culturally). Should we not include it in the city's population count? Does the Bay Point — Brentwood corridor in Contra Costa County not count because it's not contiguous? What about San Joaquin and Stanislaus Counties?

[Crawford]

Baltimore is culturally, economically and historically very different from DC. Baltimore, if anything, is culturally, economically and historically more intertwined with Philly.

So even as the sprawl merges, there will be a distinction.