Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed
I agree that SoCal is more continuously filled in than the Great Lakes, but there's nowhere near the gap in development in the Great Lakes as exists between NoVa, the Carolinas and Atlanta. The Toronto-Buffalo-Detroit/Windsor-Toledo-Cleveland-Pittsburgh horn is pretty much continuously developed all the way around Lake Erie with no gaps between the metropolitan areas (Toledo and Cleveland will even share a congressional district after the 2010 redistricting). Likewise, the Chicago-Milwaukee super-metro(?) is pretty continuously developed. Chicago and Milwaukee have a similar relationship as NYC and Philadelphia, just with two smaller cities.
This is why I always thought a Great Lakes rail system made more sense than just about anywhere in the country outside of BosWash. Far more sense than the high-speed waste of money that they want to build in Florida...
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Using the The Great Lakes example, you could already combine Richmond into BosWash corridor and then there's a similar gap between Richmond and Raleigh. With Lake Erie, there is a gap between London and Windsor, and I'd lump in London with the GTA before Detroit-Windsor, btw. I think rail could definitely work for passenger travel in the midwest, but it just goes to show that the megalopolis in the northeast isn't just large population centers near one another; there's a lot of inter-connectivity in other areas that has developed over a long period of time. I don't even like consolidating all of the metro's on the east coast, but my main point is that SoCal is more comparable to NYC-Philly than it is to the Great Lakes Megalopolis.