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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 Ida

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.

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.