Quote:
Originally Posted by softee
I certainly don't want to bring back those old internet battles of yore, but that's not really apples to apples because it's comparing Chicago's urban area population and (strictly built-up) land area to Toronto's Greater Metropolitan area (excluding Hamilton) which includes huge swaths of undeveloped land.
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thanks for clearing that up, i was just trying to find measurements that used approximately the same land area for the two because the way that the US census bureau mashes together counties to form MSA's and CSA's
WILDLY exaggerates the land area stats of US metro areas.
people read the stat that the chicago CSA is over 10,000 sq. miles in land area and they are like
"OMG!!!!! that's so fucking huge! chicagoland is like the size of the moon or something!", without realizing that ~70% of that land area is literally just corn fields in a dozen surrounding sparsely-populated rural counties that send a handful of commuters into chicago to meet the bureau's commuter % threshold. the census bureau's Urban Area definition gives a profoundly more accurate picture of how big chicagoland really is in terms of where people actually live.