Quote:
Originally Posted by PoshSteve
While the metro areas of Cleveland/Akron/Canton, Youngstown/Warren and Pittsburgh/Wheeling may not be growing in absolute population numbers, they all continue to sprawl out and closer together. They are far from being completely built up, urban areas in between, but then again, so is BosWash.
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My $0.02:
This region -- a sort of L-shaped continuous conurbation that extends down Lake Erie from Buffalo and then up the Mahoning and Beaver river valleys to Pittsburgh -- suffers from a bit of a Balkans problem.
All three cities lie at trade route nexuses: from Buffalo, trade routes extend up the Mohawk Valley, along the Southern Tier, down the Allegheny River, into Canada, and along Lakes Erie and Ontario; from Pittsburgh, down the Ohio, up the Allegheny to Buffalo, up the Beaver and Mahoning to Cleveland, up the Beaver and Shenago to Erie, up the Monongahela to Morgantown and West Virginia, up the Kiskimentas and Conemaugh towards Philadelphia, and up the Youghiogheny towards the Potomac; from Cleveland, along Lake Erie to Buffalo and Toledo, up the Cuyahoga towards Columbus and Cincinnati, and down the Mahoning towards Pittsburgh.
While St. Louis sits at the single largest concentration of natural trade routes in the country -- significant enough that, had the railroads never developed, it would have become the Midwest's alpha city -- the cat's cradle of trade routes that the purportive Buffalo-Cleveland-Pittsburgh megalopolis sits on interlinks the Northeast and Midwest.
All land and maritime traffic between those two regions
must pass through at least one (and usually at least two) of the major cities in this region.
But that has also spawned a schizophrenic identity. Pittsburgh was originally settled from the Mid-Atlantic region, while Buffalo was settled by New Englanders and New Yorkers. Both look east. Cleveland looks west, to Chicago, as its alpha city. Settlement patterns also result in a second divide: between "Lakes" and "River" Midwests. This divide is so pernicious that Pittsburgh refuses to see Cleveland as a sister city despite them being only a hundred miles apart and linked via a continuous conurbation (i.e. the Mahoning Valley).
To make a long story short,
Buffalo, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh already are a megacity -- just one that is unwilling to see itself as such.