Lrfox, agree with a lot of your points. Have always put a considerable amount of faith in the MSA format for a reasonable guide for overall urban size. However, I always felt that the CSA figures were a little overboard for the amount of real estate they cover. Like bank mergers, someday we'll have only 20 or 30 CSA's to cover the entire country!
Portland's MSA does dip a little further south that I feel it should, but I don't draw the lines on the map, that is left to the urban experts in Washington. If I did, Boston would be part of Greater Portland! Lewiston/Auburn is not part of Portland's MSA, but is part of it's CSA.
Do agree that the NECTA figures are an excellent source for a realistic count for the unique grouping of New England cities, especially with the short distances between urban centers. Wish they could generate some type of computer imagery and utilize some sort of scale to determine massing, density and height of the downtown districts of every city. This would give us another tool other than population counts to determine a city's actual size or footprint.
I often wonder how many people in the country actually care about stuff like this besides people on this site, Emporis and the SkyscraperPage? Are we considered urban geeks
When it comes to MSA, I think it's a good measure of the principal city's influence over a certain area, not the actual size/density/sprawl of the city. In the case of Portland, I would say that it's fairly accurate as Portland is by far the most influential city over that region with the exception of the towns adjacent to the Portsmouth/Dover/Rochester area. Still, while those few towns on the Southern end of things may not be as "influenced" by Portland, you could argue that there are towns to the North that aren't counted in the MSA that ARE more oriented towards Portland than Lewiston (Lewiston's draw, IMHO doesn't extend as far South as the stats show... that's Portland territory). In the end, I'd call it a wash with Portland.
Where I feel that MSA is off the mark is getting a feel for the actual physical size of a city. Sticking with Portland, you're looking at an area that's largely rural. Even the many of the innermost suburbs (Scarborough, Falmouth, Cumberland, Yarmouth, Gorham, etc) are fairly rural in pockets (or more). Beyond that, it becomes very rural. Still, there's no denying that Portland is the principal city for that region and one can "feel" that when visiting a community like Buxton and beyond. However, a large chunk of those towns in the MSA aren't suburbs. In fact, they're not even close. They're rural communities and Portland just so happens to be the closest influential urban area even though it's upwards of 60 miles from some of the towns in the metro area. Portland feels smaller than the 514,000 would lead one to believe (it's urbanized area is about 1/3 the size of the overall metro at 188,000 which includes Westbrook, South Portland, Scarborough, Saco, Biddeford and more). To me, I think of Greater Portland as having somewhere in the ballpark of 250,000-300,000 people. It doesn't feel like an area of 1/2 a million.
Even the City of Portland website says Portland's metro area is 230,000.
Providence, RI doesn't feel like an urban area of 1.6 Million people even though that's what the MSA says. It feels a bit smaller. Large chunks of it are fairly low density or rural (Coventry, Rehoboth, Freetown, etc). Providence may be the most influential city over that area, but it doesn't FEEL like there are 1.6 Million people in Greater Providence. Many of the cities and towns in that area are distinctly different in terms of character and feel than Providence despite the fact that some may commute to work or use some of the healthcare facilities in PVD (New Bedford, again, comes to mind). Boston, on the other hand, feels every bit the 4.5 Million that apparently live around it.
The polar opposite of a MSA like Portland (that covers a far ranging, mostly rural area) or PVD would be a San Francisco. San Francisco's metro is smaller than Boston's according to those statistics. However, most who have spent time in both cities would probably say that San Francisco feels like a much larger metropolitan area than Boston (I know I do). Instead of spanning a wide-reaching largely rural area, San Francisco's MSA covers two major urban area (SF and Oakland) and a lot of relatively high density suburbs in the Bay Area. What's more, is that a nearby MSA (San Jose) directly abuts it. To me, when I think of the Bay Area, I think of SF, Oakland and San Jose as one large, urban area. San Francisco's "influence" extends far beyond what that MSA digit would lead one to believe. To me, San Francisco feels more like a Metro Area of around 6 Million (or more) than one with 4.3 Million. Traveling through the Bay Area, it's impossible to tell when you've left Metro San Francisco and entered Metro San Jose. You could make a similar case with Boston and Providence, but the population density thins out quite a bit between those two cities and the overlap isn't quite as clear.
Long-winded, I know. However, that's what I see as being the problem with MSA as a general measurement of a city's size. You get a fairly decent idea (in most cases) of the influence of a city although "influence" is hard to quantify. Boston's the biggest city in New England and has a major influence on the whole region (think of Sports, colleges, healthcare, transportation, etc.). Should all of New England count as Metro Boston? No way. But where do we draw the lines?
I completely agree with CSA being a fairly useless measurement. Boston's CSA has around 7 million and includes Providence, Worcester and Manchester. I'm a believer that a real metro area will have a sense of unity. With the exception of professional sports, I don't see too much that the people in Manchester have in common with people in Providence. I wonder how much time people in Providence spend in Manchester and vice versa. The Bay area may be an exception as San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose are all fairly interconnected. Most cases, however, the CSA a bit too much.
I'm a stats geek too. Whenever the opportunity for this knowledge to come up in casual conversation with friends who aren't stats geeks or urban geeks, I usually get looked at like I have two heads. Most simply don't care. To be honest, it's fun to play with and debate, but it has little influence over reality. I think for the regular person, "feel" is the most important aspect of a city. It doesn't matter what the numbers say because after all, they're just numbers. It's how it feels to you that counts.
