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Four Million Commutes Reveal New U.S. 'Megaregions'

• bane 10y ago
  Coming form the mid-Atlantic region, I'm continuously surprised at what a non-entity Baltimore has turned out to be. It seems to have been entirely subsumed by its more well known neighbors: D.C. and Philly -- yet being so near to those two seems to have almost entirely escaped the economic and social revival that's happened in those two major regions as well. One other thought, the artificial, and somewhat arbitrary drawing of state boundaries has also made urban planning needlessly complex. If the U.S. had a method to redraw state boundaries every 20-30 years, these regions would be just about the right size to be states, and this would greatly simplify the planning and coordination of everything from transit to education delivery. Instead, most of these regions cut across these administrative boundaries and medium sized 5 year projects turn into multi-decade, highly wasteful, high friction programs with an extraordinary high chance of failure.
  • bluejekyll 10y ago
    > If the U.S. had a method to redraw state boundaries every 20-30 years, these regions would be just about the right size to be states, and this would greatly simplify the planning and coordination of everything from transit to education delivery. This is a really interesting idea. While it is extremely logical, it would never happen. People are surprisingly attached to their identities associated with their state and countries. See the amazing news surrounding the land swap in Belgium and the Netherlands recently... it made news because so few people think of borders as arbitrary lines on maps.
    • mc32 10y ago
      In the UK there was a redrawing of county lines back in the mid 70s. States do have the mechanism to self-divide. So far this hasn't happened but there have been proposals "State of Jefferson" in Norcal South Oregon. When people think Cal has too few senators for it's pop., one solution is to divide.
      • uiri 10y ago
        > When people think Cal has too few senators for it's pop., one solution is to divide. Isn't the whole point of the US Senate to prevent the more populous states from passing stuff against the interests of the less populous states? There is no such thing as too few senators for a state's population.
        • bluejekyll 10y ago
          If CA were to divide, this would imply that two more Senators would be added to Congress, and coming from this region, it would imply more representation of the west coast ideas in congress.
          • mc32 10y ago
            Yes, exactly. I'm not saying I either want or don't want more west coast ideas in congress, I'm saying if people say we have too few senators for the pop. a solution is divide. Also, I'm not certain a "Jefferson" would be the same politically as So. Cal and Bay area.
          • nostrademons 10y ago
            Jefferson would likely be more conservative than either CA or OR. If you've ever visited the North Coast of California, it's very rural in character, and in culture is much closer to Montana or Wyoming than the Bay Area.
        • dcosson 10y ago
          By that logic there's also no such thing as too many senators for a given number of square miles if you cram enough states into it, so California could split into 100 states and that would be just as fair.
        • kerbalspacepro 10y ago
          The point of the Senate is to protect slavery.
      • umanwizard 10y ago
  • massysett 10y ago
    US federalism isn't about efficiency. If anything, federalism is intentionally inefficient.
    • xapata 10y ago
      Depends on what timeframe you're thinking about. Some things are inefficient short term, because of redundancies, but that makes them more robust and therefore more efficient in the long run.
      • int_19h 10y ago
        Even short term, it could be argued that federalism was the most efficient option available, because the states wouldn't unite under any other conditions... and the union was definitely more efficient than they were separately.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • bkeroack 10y ago
    US states are not merely administrative divisions (like provinces in other nations) but are literal independently-governed states. Would you also propose re-drawing the borders of every EU nation every 30 years to reflect population movement? This misunderstanding (provinces vs states) leads to much misunderstanding of the US federal system in general, the electoral college, role of the federal government, etc.
    • kakarot 10y ago
      How does the electoral college play into this?
      • Spooky23 10y ago
        The United States is a union of nominally sovereign states. You see this in crisis situations -- States cannot declare bankruptcy, for example. The electoral college is a mechanism used for these states to select a president (the only nationally elected office) in a representative manner.
        • bkeroack 10y ago
          Not just nominal! The Constitution ensures the sovereignty of the states by restricting the federal government to a limited set of enumerated powers (among them: foreign policy, national defense, regulation of interstate commerce) with all other powers retained by the states (10th Amendment).
          • repsilat 10y ago
            > a limited set of enumerated powers (among them: foreign policy, national defense, regulation of interstate commerce) Unfortunately, the modern interpretation of "interstate commerce" is roughly "any other powers they might care to have". The Tenth Amendment has essentially been superseded by the Commerce Clause since the New Deal.
            • 10y ago
  • madengr 10y ago
    Sounds like the Kansas City region that is bisected into KS and MO, with both states offering tax incentives for business to move. Some business flip flop locations every few years. It's the border war all over again. I live in KS and work in MO. http://www.npr.org/2016/05/05/476844402/jobs-tug-of-war-kansas-city-businesses-poached-by-kansas-missouri http://www.npr.org/2016/05/05/476844402/jobs-tug-of-war-kans...
    • shawn-butler 10y ago
      What is the tax situation like there? Some bordering states have given up on reciprocity requiring residents to file two state returns. Such a pain.
      • madengr 10y ago
        I have to file both MO and KS returns, and also pay KC, MO 1% city earnings tax. I have to over withhold on MO, then (normally) with that refund turn around and pay KS. Though with Brownbacks tax cuts I am now getting couple $100 returned. File ASAP with MO as those last to file are last in line for refunds. If the state is out of money, like it was a few years ago, I didn't get my refund until August. One of the only pluses is being able to get in-state tuition for some MO schools; not that I will send my kids there. They have two choices, and they both start with a K.
    • int_19h 10y ago
      Another weird example is the border between Washington and Oregon. Washington has sales tax, but no income tax; Oregon has income tax, but no sales tax. So if you live and work in Vancouver, WA, but shop across the river in Portland, OR (it's literally just the river separating these two), you can dodge either tax. (Technically, if you go shopping to Portland from Vancouver, you're supposed to pay a use tax on those goods. But there's no practical way to enforce it, and few people are even aware of it.)
    • kerbalspacepro 10y ago
      One of the biggest drivers of economic inequality between the states is their business strategy. New York, California? They build new businesses. Kentucky and Louisiana and Kansas? Try to lure old businesses to move. The former strategy is obviously superior, hence the resentment the latter states hold.
  • rm999 10y ago
    Normally, proximity to a bigger city like DC should be a good thing - you can get a nicer place for cheap and use public transportation (MARC train) to commute. But something has prevented Baltimore from growing and gentrifying. I think the biggest problem, the obvious one, is crime. There are some small pockets of intense gentrification, and even these areas aren't particularly safe. The rest of the city is a no-man's land. Literally within a few blocks of crowded, active areas (e.g. Fells Point) there are extremely unsafe blocks where the chances of a mugging (or worse) are unreasonably high. Then, there are huge contiguous swaths of the city where no one but residents are really advised to enter. I remember going out to a bar in West Baltimore and not a single cab was willing to drive into the neighborhood to pick us up. The patrons of the bar refused to let us walk home ("you're gonna get stabbed!"), and a kind stranger drove us home. Most people I know who live in Baltimore want out, and many either move to DC or to the suburbs.
    • cbHXBY1D 10y ago
      When I was a high school senior checking out Johns Hopkins I had the bright idea of going on a run through the city at 11pm. I was from a town that borders Oakland so I thought "this should be fine." I ended up getting chased through a neighborhood that looked like WWII had just hit. Baltimore is an interesting case in the U.S. because it's really the last dense, walk-able city that hasn't gentrified. Philadelphia is similar but it is experiencing gentrification in the core now. All over the country, millenials have been moving to older cities that were planned before cars and are possible to live in without one. I wonder why Baltimore hasn't suffered the same fate as Oakland, Brooklyn, or Philly? America seems like a tale of two countries at this point. We have cities that are burgeoning with young wealthy types trying to move there like SF, NYC, LA, Seattle, Boston, etc. Over-gentrified until they have become somewhat sterile. If only we could move some of the success of these cities to places that need it like the Rust Belt or Baltimore.
    • Edmond 10y ago
      Your comment is a very unfair and inaccurate description of Baltimore, it is also one that I hear often from people who clearly have no meaningful experience with the city. It is a city with many problems, no one can deny that, but like most urban tales told by people who don't live in these places, their understanding are much more urban legend than reality. I have lived in Baltimore for the past 6 years and I am hopeful about the future of the city. I live in Mt Vernon, one of the more "upscale" neighborhoods, in the time I have lived there, there's been a good deal of development both in the neighborhood and the city as a whole. I am actually looking at buying a house in Bolton Hill (another quite nice and safe neighborhood)...the property tax rate has given me pause but otherwise I am excited about the future of the city. I don't want to go on a rant but Baghdad type stories like yours are not helpful.
  • erikpukinskis 10y ago
    One of the benefits of splitting administrative control in a population is that policy differences between the administrations become visible to that population. If every administration has a cultural moat around it, it becomes impossible to separate policy effects from culture effects. I think this is one of the key benefits to the federal system. In some sense the lines are supposed to be arbitrary.
  • billforsternz 10y ago
    When I was a map and gazetteer obsessed child 40+ years ago Baltimore was my favourite US city (I am not in the US) because it was one of the ten largest U.S. cities yet most people I knew had never heard of it. I recall Buffalo was right up there too, for similar reasons.
  • surfmike 10y ago
    Redrawing state boundaries has a whole host of other issues, but it definitely would be interesting to make regional governing bodies that are in charge of all federal infrastructure dollars. Even though the Bay Area is all contained in California, it's splintered into so many cities and counties that public transportation and land use policies don't adapt fast enough to the growing population.
  • mikey_p 10y ago
    It sounds like what you are describing is the system of metropolitan planning organizations in the US. I'm especially spoiled after living in Portland, OR for almost 10 years as they have a very active MPO (called 'Metro') and has democratically elected representatives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_planning_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_planning_organiza...
  • colanderman 10y ago
    The problem is, some of the cities that serve as centers of these economic regions do so primarily because they are state capitals. Were state lines drawn to surround them (and exclude neighboring more independently prosperous cities) I think they would greatly decrease in economic importance. Ex. New York state is the largest employer in the region surrounding Albany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_District#Economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_District#Economy
  • raverbashing 10y ago
    However, some people do like the current arrangement, as it allows them to work in one state and live in another
  • barking 10y ago
    I'm not American and have never been to Baltimore but if its characterisation in 'The Wire' is accurate (a corrupt, drug and crime ridden ghetto) then I am not surprised.
  • Mz 10y ago
    You assume that things would remain as they are, only betterer, if you redrew these divisions. That is incredibly unlikely. Some people intentionally live in one state and work in another for various reasons, or live in one city and work in another. Part of the appeal is often differences rooted in laws and regulations, etc.
  • Grishnakh 10y ago
    You're exactly right, and that's why I've been advocating redrawing the state boundaries for years now. There was a project decades ago called "The 38 States" (google it) where a college class came up with a new map of the US with more optimized state borders, with the goal of having more equal populations in each state, not having metro areas cross state borders, and grouping like regional cultures together, and also reducing the total number of states to reduce overhead. I think a big project to redraw all the borders would be painful, but would create big gains before too long. I don't know that they need to be redrawn every couple of decades though; perhaps a few little tweaks here and there would be called for though. But the borders we have a completely at odds with where they should be for administrative efficiency.
• Spooky23 10y ago
  Cool maps that correlate with my acendotal experience. When you take the early (5-6 am) morning train from Albany to Penn Station regularly, it's easy to spot the small number off small number commuters from the more typical government workers, lawyers and salesmen. It's about a 50/50 mix of construction guys and attorneys. I sat with one of the constructions guys once and we chatted. He was an electrician and actually drove another 45 minutes from his home to the train. Had a big family and couldn't afford NY metro costs. Claimed that a majority of the guys he worked with either lived in the Hudson Valley or Pennsylvania for the same reason. That really says a lot... I think a commuter pass costs like $800/mo for that trip!
• davidw 10y ago
  I really don't get what this is supposed to represent, exactly. No one commutes from Ashland, Oregon to Portland Oregon - it's a 4+ hour drive. Yet they're in the same pink area. Meanwhile, no one really commutes from Bend to Portland either (2.5 hour drive in good weather), but we're brown over here. There's certainly some more cultural affinity between cities in Oregon's Willamette Valley than with the more conservative central and eastern part of the state, but even that only holds for the larger cities - there are plenty of pretty 'red' places down the I-5 corridor.
  • sakopov 10y ago
    Oh i'm sure people commute. A 4 hour drive is fairly reasonable. I live in Denver and commute to Kansas City (8.5 hours) once a month to visit my folks. If you include gas prices and the price of rentals it comes out to be cheaper than flying and renting a car in KC. With shorter distances this would probably be a huge factor for many. For example, most folks in KC drive to StL which is a 3.5 hour drive. I don't think anyone I've ever known in KC flew to StL.
    • adevine 10y ago
      When the article says "commute" it's mainly referring to people who commute daily (or often) for work.
      • pessimizer 10y ago
        There are people who commute for clusters of days, though. If you work a three-on, four-off schedule, commuting in to start the three and out when the three are done is perfectly reasonable for a distant job and doesn't preclude having a healthy home life, too. There are also people who are mostly remote and only come in once a week for face-to-face meetings.
      • makeapoint 10y ago
        Airline pilots can commute from Phoenix to Minneapolis regularly.
    • 10y ago
• deathhand 10y ago
  Oh look they published the future Hyper-loop map. How nice of them.
  • djsumdog 10y ago
    Long before a Hyper-loop will be viable, this is the map of where all our high speed rails should have been placed. Currently, only the California high speed corridor is under construction (Florida has stalled and I'm not sure if the Cascades ever got funding). We are decades behind the rest of the world in viable rail. To people who say rail can't work in the US, just look at this map. Only the NE section has decent rail and it's saturated for commuters. Building out the rest of the rail infrastructure we need will reduce the need for cars and help deal with pollution. Once cities are connected, I think we'll naturally see the expansion of urban/commuter rail to solve the last mile problem.
• wjossey 10y ago
  A couple points of clarification for those who found this interesting: [1] Data around commuting time can be found in the American Community Survey (ACS), which is released annually with 1, 3, and 5 year rollups (for general blending of accuracy vs. recency). [2] This data is looking specifically at work commute times, not any personal travel. I've been taking a couple months off between jobs, and learning the ACS has become a hobby during that time. Lots of interesting and fascinating data that we collect on ourselves as a country. Reference: https://www.census.gov/hhes/commuting/ https://www.census.gov/hhes/commuting/
  • rch 10y ago
    I work with ACS data as well. I'd love to chat about your interests sometime.
• benibela 10y ago
  So this is where people live? https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/ Nothing going on Montana?
  • loeg 10y ago
    Not a lot of people in the Rocky mountains or the plains.
    • protomyth 10y ago
      I would imagine their commute data finds the area problematic.
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• 762236 10y ago
  I live in Menlo Park in the Bay Area, and have given specialized jobs to contractors that drove 2 to 3 hours to fix my house. These guys target this area, despite being so far away, and use phablets to stay connected and maintain their Yelp presence.
• umanwizard 10y ago
  I want to meet the people who are supposedly commuting to Phoenix from north of the Grand Canyon. Do they commute by helicopter?
• niftich 10y ago
  The arbitrary choice of 50 regions results in some fairly generous interpretations of 'regions'. Namely, this method produces two kinds of regions: ones that are clustered around a single metropolitan area that has a higher-than-average commuter pull around its hinterland, and ones that are slightly too far from a major metro and lump together a chain of areas that form a loose "commuter continuum" of areas where commuters have two or more equally plausible choices to commuter to -- this chain then hops along interstate highways, grouping unrelated towns across hundreds of miles into the same region. Take the one that they call 'Corn Belt', encompassing Des Moines, Davenport/Moline, and every single city in Illinois on I-74 (including Urbana-Champaign!). In no universe do people commute hundreds of miles along I-74. In truth, this is a polycentric area with many distinct loci which attract their own, distinct set of commuters: Des Moines/Ames; Cedar Rapids/Iowa City; Quad Cities; Peoria; Urbana-Champaign. The "cohesiveness" of the region exists solely in contrast to its neighbors: that more populous metros on the region's fringes are all too far out of sane commuting distance. Or the Appalachians: Roanoke in Virginia forms a vital locus for much of west-central Virginia and yet is swallowed into a much larger region including Greensboro, Raleigh, and Wilmington(!), because people living midway between Roanoke and Greensboro (like in Danville, VA, or Martinsville, VA), have two equally plausible larger job centers to commute to. The same can be said about Charleston, WV, which forms a job hub in West Virginia, but is grouped together with Columbus and most of Ohio because smaller towns along the Ohio River are roughly equidistant from either. It helps me to look at each of their regions and think "people rarely commute outside of their region", rather than the more natural interpretation of "people commute along their region".
  • rosalinekarr 10y ago
    Yeah, I had the same thought when I saw my own region, Chattanooga, TN. This map shows our whole city as commuters to Atlanta. Almost no one commutes to Atlanta from here. It's a 3 hour drive without traffic and a 5 hour drive with traffic, and the only time Atlanta doesn't have traffic is 3 AM in the morning.
    • emodendroket 10y ago
      I hear it's not much worse at 3 AM at night.
• taeric 10y ago
  The lack of a name in the giant section in the northwest on the final map is... interesting. I think I get why it has no name. Still odd. Similarly, the "deep south" feels like a shoutout to Futurama. (Though, Atlanta is already named. I guess it is "pre move to the ocean." :) )
• erikpukinskis 10y ago
  You can call this "research" but it's not science. When you do science you can't just run your data, decide the numbers don't look right, and then tweak them until the picture produced looks publishable. That is a way to make art that reflects your worldview, but it won't have any science content left in it. If they wanted to do science they would need to devise a model of megaregions, form hypotheses, design tests ahead of time to confirm or refute those hypothesis, and only then run the data.
• ChuckMcM 10y ago
  I think it shows us once again how clustering algorithms fail which isn't very useful. I can think of several methodologies that would make for a better analysis for urban planning. However the one thing it did suggest is that Google would be in an interesting position to create such data sets using their maps navigation data. Take every commercial address in a region and the compute the commute time to and from every residential address in the same region. Pick some arbitrary one-way commute cut offs like 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes, and 120 minutes. Then plot them on a spectrum from based on the weighted average of commute times (so if a site had 6,000 30 minute commutes, 40,000 60 minute commutes, and 250,000 90 minute commutes it would get one score higher than a place that only had 1000 30 minute commutes and 300,000 90 minute commutes.
  • RangerScience 10y ago
    That would not achieve that the authors were after. That would show you what the regions _could_ be, not what they _are_, since you'd be comparing possible commutes rather than ones actually taken.
  • flashman 10y ago
    > it shows us once again how clustering algorithms fail What do you mean by 'fail'? It looks like the algorithm ultimately did what they wanted it to, so do you mean some sort of relevance or practical failure? All clustering algorithms do is propose groupings in which intra-group links are stronger than inter-group links. The researchers measured the modularity of their clusters, where 0 is 'no better than random' and 1 is 'networks with strong community structure', and scored over 0.9 (though they had to make some changes to eliminate long-distance linkages). I agree that Google would have much better commuting data, if they chose not to anonymise their maps data collection, because they could determine where your phone usually spends the night and the middle hours of the day... as well as the route taken to get there and back.
• xyzzy4 10y ago
  Why don't they give the map in high resolution? Really irritating.
• e2e4 10y ago
  somehow it is not mentioned which software was used to generate the graphics; not even in the original article: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166083 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
• applecore 10y ago
  The Northeast Boswash megalopolis[1] is a narrow 400-mile strip of land that encompasses a population of over 50 million people. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis
• btbuildem 10y ago
  This information would be useful when planning the next-gen transportation network..
• schiffern 10y ago
  I'm reminded of what Christopher Alexander et. al. wrote in A Pattern Language. Made up of 253 patterns organized by scale, the largest scale discussed (and therefore Pattern #1) is "Independent Regions:" Do what you can to establish a world government, with a thousand independent regions, instead of Metropolitan regions will not come to balance until each one is small and autonomous enough to be an independent sphere of culture. There are four separate arguments which have led us to this conclusion: I. The nature and limits of human government. 2. Equity among regions in a world community. 3. Regional planning considerations. 4. Support for the intensity and diversity of human cultures. I. There are natural limits to the size of groups that can govern themselves in a human way. The biologist J. B. S. Haldane has remarked on this in his paper, "On Being the Right Size": > ...just as there is a best size for every animal, so the same is true for every human institution. In the Greek type of democracy all the citizens could listen to a series of orators and vote directly on questions of legislation. Hence their philosophers held that a small city was the largest possible democratic state. . . . (J. B. S Haldane, "On Being the Right Size," The World of Mathematics, Vol. II, J. R. Newman, ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956, pp. 962-67). It is not hard to see why the government of a region becomes less and less manageable with size. In a population of N persons, there are of the order of N^2 person-to-person links needed to keep channels of communication open. Naturally, when N goes beyond a certain limit, the channels of communication needed for democracy and justice and information are simply too clogged, and too complex; bureaucracy overwhelms human processes. And, of course, as N grows the number of levels in the hierarchy of government increases too. In small countries like Denmark there are so few levels, that any private citizen can have access to the Minister of Education. But this kind of direct access is quite impossible in larger countries like England or the United States. We believe the limits are reached when the population of a region reaches some 2 to 10 million. Beyond this size, people become remote from the large-scale processes of government. Our estimate may seem extraordinary in the light of modern history: the nation-states have grown mightily and their governments hold power over tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions, of people. But these huge powers cannot claim to have a natural size. 54 regions, total population 318.9m. So that averages 5.9 million per, right smack in the middle. A more complete analysis with a histogram would be interesting.
• yellowapple 10y ago
  "And I’m not convinced the Bay Area-Sacramento megaregion where I live should extend all the way to Nevada." I agree with this. I live in Truckee, and would be much more inclined to commute to Reno (which is 30 minutes away) than Sacramento (which is 1 hour 30 minutes away). The more likely border would at the very least be near Donner Pass. The algorithms used are likely being influenced by the Sierras (and particularly Tahoe) being a popular tourist destination for Sacramento and Bay Area residents.
• owenversteeg 10y ago
  From personal experience (I've lived in 3 places in the US), some of these make sense and some don't at all. For example, the little light green region over Idaho Falls/Pocatello area makes sense as a region and looks nice. But Burlington and Albany being one region? They're three hours apart, separated by a whole lotta nothing - I know because I lived a bit east of that nothing. Or the adjacent "economic area" (in green, covering Boston/NH/Maine), which also makes no sense. There's no way that far-north Maine, western NH, and Boston are one economic area. And aside from making connections that aren't there, there are some connections that should be there that aren't. The Upper Valley is definitely either one economic region (or a a subset of a larger region) and it's literally split in half, in two separate regions. It's pretty funny, the way the map splits the economic zones down the Connecticut river you'd think we didn't have bridges. Fun unrelated fact: Pocatello has "the worst flag of North America" according to the North American Vexillological Association: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_Pocatello_Idaho.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_Pocatello_Idaho.jpg
  • dsfyu404ed 10y ago
    I agree. Bangor, Augusta and Portland are all on the same highway but they're all mostly separate economic regions.
  • sulam 10y ago
    Reading the article makes it clear what's going on here, although you have to get to the end. I had the same reaction to the idea of Tahoe and SF being considered part of the same "megaregion", since while someone may drive from Tahoe to SF on an irregular basis, the number of people doing it everyday must be miniscule. So I read deeper to try and understand the basis of these things. TL;DR -- they arbitrarily chose 50 as the number of regions to consider. Everything above a certain threshold gets associated with some sort of region, and then they did basic clustering to see which commutes get assigned to which region. So in my Tahoe example, more people are commuting from the Tahoe area to Sacramento than to Reno, so Tahoe ends up associated with the entire SF Bay Area megaregion instead of with Reno, which it's geographically much closer to. If there had been more regions, Sacramento would have gotten its own region most likely.
• Pica_soO 10y ago
  There is the landfilling trend in san francisco- i wonder- is there a point where its more economical to extend a city in underwater suburbs?
• beedogs 10y ago
  The big takeaway here for me is that a lot of people travel far too great a distance to get to what's most likely a terrible job.
• cwp 10y ago
  This sort of thing is fascinating to me. I think that somehow, humanity needs to transition to a political structure where cities are the primary unit of governance, rather than nations. That won't happen quickly or soon, but someday... More immediately, it's becoming increasingly clear that the "polarization" that we're seeing in U.S. politics isn't really between left and right or Ds and Rs. It's between the urban and rural. I'd love to see a version of this that drew boundaries between urban centres and the countryside. That would give us a way to start thinking about how to craft policy that recognizes the differences between them.
  • SlipperySlope 10y ago
    Your notion, shared by Clinton, cost her the election.
    • justinator 10y ago
      But not, by a long shot, the Popular Vote.
      • SlipperySlope 10y ago
        Spending much more than Trump, campaigning in the wrong places. Winning the popular vote big and losing the election is a manifest sign of a failed campaign.
      • grzm 10y ago
        Let's not take the bait to turn every thread into an election discussion.
    • grzm 10y ago
      Let's try not to take every opportunity to turn a thread into a re-hash discussion on the election.
    • dsfyu404ed 10y ago
      I'd say the opposite cost her the election. She failed to realize where the split was. If she had she would have campaigned in all the right places. It's not like both sides didn't know exactly how much each piece on the board was worth.
• pizza 10y ago
  Looking at the map that shows Santa Cruz, I can't help but imagine how many more commutes there would be "over the hill" on Highway 17 if there weren't such a hilly, windy road via that commute. Eventually it might become economically feasible to physically "move mountains" so to speak for the purpose of unlocking greater personal transport... I wonder how much terraforming might affect future projects across all the world, let alone Northern California.
• easychewie 10y ago
  See previous work by Munroe: https://www.xkcd.com/1138/ https://www.xkcd.com/1138/
• dbg31415 10y ago
  Rapid City gets a region but not Austin? Uh?
• kriro 10y ago
  Lubbock, Spokane...looks like it's mostly around universities in the "nowhere land" regions?