Quote:
Originally Posted by EngiNerd
Another way that I think is very useful for determining populations is looking at the urbanized areas, and tallying those populations. For the Denver/Boulder/Aurora metro, I consider the following urbanized areas to be part of that, using Hwy 66 as my cutoff to the north. Arguments could be made that places like Johnstown probably commute to Boulder, and should be included, but I thought they probably belonged to the Fort Collins/Greeley MSA
Maps here for fun
https://censusreporter.org/
- Boulder = 114,591
- Denver/Aurora = 2,374,203
- Evergreen = 13,556
- Firestone/Frederick = 21,474
- Fort Lupton = 9,055
- Lafayette/Louisville/Erie = 79,407
- Lochbuie = 4,120
- Longmont = 90,897
- Roxborough Park = 8,503
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Total = 2,715,806
It doesn't capture some of the outlying areas that have population but are less organized, but I think it does a pretty good job.
(data from Sept. 2016 http://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/refe...a_list_all.txt)
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I'm curious how good this method is at capturing unincorporated or rural areas that are part of a metro area. It looks like the censusreporter map has boundaries drawn around many census-designated places, for example Eldorado Springs or Niwot in Boulder County. But it's unclear to me if these areas capture enough rural residents to give an accurate number - it looks like the boundaries drawn around places like Aspen Park and Evergreen don't account for all of the residential development up there, and large parts of rural Boulder County don't have any census-designated place boundaries drawn around them. And were you tallying these areas as part of your count?
To me, this has always been a reason why the MSA and CSA format, as clunky as it is, still gives the most accurate number. It seems to be more accurate in states that have smaller counties, or townships as in MA. Out here in the west where we have counties like Weld or Riverside county CA, that are the size of small states, it creates problems like Greeley getting included in the Denver CSA. Frankly, I can't help but wonder if it is nearing time for Weld county to be subdivided again, since the southern part of it is pretty clearly Metro Denver, and the north/northeastern part is not.