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A comment on Maps that show the anatomy of America’s vast infrastructure. Parent comment

Re:Maps that show the anatomy of America’s vast infrastructure by bradleyjg on Thursday December 01, 2016 @05:29PM (#13084176)
Measuring city size is a tricky endeavor. Municipal borders are pretty arbitrary and so not a great way to decide what the real size of the urbanized area is. The OECD has a methodology they call "functional urban areas"[1] that starts by identifying linked high density clusters and then refining from there.

Using their methodology the order is: LA, NYC, Chicago, SF, Houston, DC, Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, and Phoenix.[2]

[1] https://www.oecd.org/gov/regional-policy/Definition-of-Funct...

[2] https://www.oecd.org/gov/regional-policy/functional-urban-ar...

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Re:Maps that show the anatomy of America’s vast infrastructure by sien on Thursday December 01, 2016 @05:52PM (#13084344)
The wikpedia list of Primary Statistical Areas is pretty useful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_primary_statistical_ar...

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Re:Maps that show the anatomy of America’s vast infrastructure by kodablah on Thursday December 01, 2016 @06:29PM (#13084614)
Even those are way too large to represent "city areas" (i.e. metropolitan areas). A more reasonable comparison may be to use their subdivisions, MSA's [0], which can help overcome issues with city boundaries but they too are of course a bit arbitrary and misleading but can also give a better showing of size [1]. I've seen these used in many statistical scenarios concerning population centers.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistic...

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Re:Maps that show the anatomy of America’s vast infrastructure by sremani on Thursday December 01, 2016 @05:56PM (#13084372)
Tricky indeed, esp. in a world where Dallas ends up behind Miami and Atlanta, the likely fault of Dallas is that it has a quasi twin city called Ft.Worth.
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Re:Maps that show the anatomy of America’s vast infrastructure by FrancoDiaz on Thursday December 01, 2016 @06:43PM (#13084689)
Yeah, I always thought Dallas metro (including Ft. Worth) was bigger than Houston metro.
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