5 ms·

is 1 million people a lot? I lived most of my life in metro areas of 15-30 million. when I finally ventured out and saw so many famous places at 1.5 million or

by nox101 2y ago

is 1 million people a lot? I lived most of my life in metro areas of 15-30 million. when I finally ventured out and saw so many famous places at 1.5 million or less and how I could drive in and then back out of their downtowns in just a few blocks I was kind of shocked on how small most places are

graeme 2y ago
There are only 26 areas in the world which are 15-30 million. They have about 550 million people, or about 7% of the world's population. 1 million is fairly large, especially in the context of Chile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities
- Retric 2y ago
  That list really undercounts many metro areas. DC’s “Metropolitan area in 2020 was 6,385,162” it’s CSA was 9,546,579 in 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_metropolitan_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_metropolitan_area That list puts it at 5.2 million people.
  - TylerE 2y ago
    The 6M is included in the 9. They're not separate counts. That CSA also includes Baltimore so not a vary fair example. Absolutely not the same metro.
    - Retric 2y ago
      I was mostly bringing up the 5.2 vs 6.4 both under Metro area. The CSA isn’t necessarily relevant, but a reasonable agreement exists that it’s really the same metro area. The beltways (495, 695) are less than 25 miles apart. Laurel, Maryland is 20 miles from both downtown DC and downtown Baltimore. Meanwhile the other cities from Richmond to Boston are 95-200 miles from each other. I knew someone whose tech support job would regularly send them to both cities in the same day. Apparently many companies located between them so they could easily serve both.
      - bradknowles 2y ago
        You can’t just look at distance and judge. I knew guys who lived north of Baltimore but commuted every day to the Pentagon. That doesn’t make Baltimore and DC two parts of the same city. Just like there are people who commute from New York to London, or vice-versa. NyLon is a thing, but that still doesn’t make them two parts of the same city.
        Retric 2y ago
        Same city is irrelevant, same metro area based on how people behave is what matters. People commuting from downtown Baltimore to DC have a faster commute than many living in well recognized DC suburbs. That’s very different than NyLon.
        bradknowles 2y ago
        Distance is irrelevant. I lived there. The cultures of DC and Baltimore are fundamentally different. Related, yes. But not the same.
        Retric 2y ago
        The culture of poor parts of DC is vastly different than the culture of places 2 streets away. Culture is ultra local.
        bradknowles 2y ago
        Culture is fractal, and happens on many different levels. And there are many types of stratifications of culture. And those stratifications can happen in multiple dimensions at the same time. But culture can also refer to a larger conglomeration of smaller cultures, or components of smaller cultures. Just like a meal or dinner from one place can have many different components, and be differently prepared from a meal or dinner of the same overall type from some other place. There are components that may be shared between them, and there might be components that are different. But even if you start out with the exact same components in both places, the end result may be radically different, simply due to the different methods and the different people involved. In the case of DC versus Baltimore, it’s the larger scale differences that I’m talking about.
    - acjohnson55 2y ago
      Having lived in Baltimore, it's juuust far enough from DC to not be a twin city.
      - pooper 2y ago
        Just out of curiosity, how far is far enough? As a thought experiment, would a shinkansen running every six minutes change this?
        jfengel 2y ago
        Instead of a shinkasen running every six minutes, we get a low-speed train that runs about once an hour, and only during working hours. If you work past 8 PM you're going to have to find another way home. I don't really know what's far enough, but culturally they consider themselves entirely distinct. People from one almost never work in the other; the trains that do exist are for bringing people from the suburbs. Even those suburbs are fairly distinct. There's a dividing line at Columbia, MD where people go both directions, and nearly everybody else affiliates themselves with one city or the other. Another way to look at it: they have separate sports teams. They're not even rivals, because they play in different leagues. Within the city fans are pretty exclusive, and the other city's teams aren't of interest. Maybe that would change if it were possible to live in one and work in the other, or if they commonly shared night-life or restaurants or leisure. Instead, the other city is a full-day trip, not a jaunt across town.
        massysett 2y ago
        None of what’s in this comment or others reflects my experience at all. I work in DC and have had many colleagues who live in downtown Baltimore and Baltimore suburbs, even suburbs north of Baltimore. They have been Orioles fans. Some have driven, others take commuter rail. I live in a suburb that is closer to DC but the commuter pattern on the highway reflects traffic flow to the Baltimore area in the morning and away from it in the evening. My wife and I work in downtown DC and we live closer to DC than Baltimore, but we routinely attend cultural and recreational events in Baltimore and of course fly from the Baltimore airport. We had memberships in the National Aquarium (in Baltimore) and have taken our kids to the Maryland Zoo. They have never been to the National Zoo in DC. Baltimore and DC are absolutely one metro, just like Dallas/Fort Worth and Minneapolis/Saint Paul. That two cities have distinct identities doesn’t mean they aren’t one metro.
    - bradknowles 2y ago
      They expanded the CSA to include Baltimore so as to reduce the average salary rate, and thus they didn’t have to pay for COLA wage increases. From late 1989 to mid 1998, I lived in various parts of Northern Virginia and the Capitol region of Maryland, and made many trips to Baltimore. Totally not the same metro.
- nox101 2y ago
  Looking at that list there are probably 100s of "metro areas" with > 1m Look at the UN 2019 population estimates and sort by it. The last 10 areas are 5.49m, 5.49m, 5.38m, 5.38, 5.30m, 5.21m, 5.16m, 5.09m, 5.05m, 5.02m Given how curves like this usually go there's an extremely long tail to get to 1m Concepcion has only ~200k people with <1m metro. Looking at a map of the city and with only 200k people it doesn't seem big
  - graeme 2y ago
    A fair point. This list has 468 above 1 million and I think that's the urban boundaries and not metro I hadn't actually googled concepcion, 200,000 in the urban area is quite small. It would be interesting to somehow workout the percentile of population living in a larger/smaller place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_with_over_one_million_inhabitants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_with_over_one_m...
SkyPuncher 2y ago
In my book, 1M people is when a city starts to become a “proper” city. It’ll host major events, invest in public transit (beyond bus), have extensive infrastructure, have extremely thorough airport service, likely have many walkable neighborhoods, and generally feel like a city. Under 1M and the city center tends to be very small with most people driving from the suburbs.
- nox101 2y ago
  We're talking metro area, not city. If the city is 1M, it's metro area is likely 1.5 to 3 million. If the metro area is 1m then the city is probably 750k to 350k people. The post above said "The Concepción metro area is 1 million people" which means the city itself is much smaller. In fact, Wikipedia says it's 200k people, 1m metro area
  - noduerme 2y ago
    Just a quibble about the metro to city population ratio... I think it's usually a lot higher than 1.5 or 3 to 1. Portland where I live has a population of around 650k (city) and 2.6M (metro). So about 4:1. And it's one of the less spread out metro areas in the US. The LA metro has about 18.5M and the city itself about 4M. Chicago is also about 4:1. NYC is the exception at closer to 2.5:1. Just having grown up in LA (the city), I think there's a cognitive bias in these places against recognizing just how freakin large they are when you live there. There are large corners of my home metro area I've never been to at all, whose people I would almost never interact with... and I say that as a former taxi driver! Of course, taxi driving in LA was always balkanized so you'd need separate licenses to pick up in this or that suburb... very Snow Crash-like even in the 90s.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >Under 1M and the city center tends to be very small with most people driving from the suburbs. That's a very US or modern Asian city view. In my corner of the world, the Rhine-Ruhr area and the Franco/German/Benelux region almost all cities are < 1 million but you'd be hard pressed to not call Ghent or Rotterdam[1] or Düsseldorf a proper city. [1]https://t0.gstatic.com/licensed-image?q=tbn:ANd9GcR5dl_qfScoQ4vSD1LUAwHIXPdaHyS8rkQ7H1x7RbPgndyMNQ4O_SOICHdcpW3NWau8 https://t0.gstatic.com/licensed-image?q=tbn:ANd9GcR5dl_qfSco...
throwaway2037 2y ago
Jesus. What a post. 15-30 million? Where? There aren't that many on the planet.
- 39896880 2y ago
  I suspect Shenzhen for one
- lazide 2y ago
  China and India both have tons of places that meet that criteria.
- com2kid 2y ago
  Traveling around China, their sense of scale it pretty much 10x what America's is. 1 million is barely a city, around 5 million and you are a 2nd tier city, hit 8+ million and you are a "real city". Meanwhile people in America are arguing that they are worried their "100k town is going to add 5000 people and become an urban hellscape!"
  - dayjaby 2y ago
    I visited a 8 million pop city. They had barely any foreign restaurants and my Chinese colleagues look down on me to have only visited a "small city".
nox101 2y ago
To all the downvotes, did you look at a map of Concepción? It's small. It's 200k people. It's "metro area" (the 1m) is spread out.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
latentsea 2y ago
As someone who lives in a city with 1.5 million people... growing up I felt pretty underwhelmed by our downtown and you can indeed pass through it in a few blocks. The first time I went to Tokyo I felt like I was in a real city. But then again, it's one of the largest cities on earth, so of course it feels like a real city. Though cities like mine are far more common.

by nox101 2y ago

graeme 2y ago

There are only 26 areas in the world which are 15-30 million. They have about 550 million people, or about 7% of the world's population. 1 million is fairly large, especially in the context of Chile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities

Retric 2y ago
That list really undercounts many metro areas. DC’s “Metropolitan area in 2020 was 6,385,162” it’s CSA was 9,546,579 in 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_metropolitan_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_metropolitan_area That list puts it at 5.2 million people.
- TylerE 2y ago
  The 6M is included in the 9. They're not separate counts. That CSA also includes Baltimore so not a vary fair example. Absolutely not the same metro.
  - Retric 2y ago
    I was mostly bringing up the 5.2 vs 6.4 both under Metro area. The CSA isn’t necessarily relevant, but a reasonable agreement exists that it’s really the same metro area. The beltways (495, 695) are less than 25 miles apart. Laurel, Maryland is 20 miles from both downtown DC and downtown Baltimore. Meanwhile the other cities from Richmond to Boston are 95-200 miles from each other. I knew someone whose tech support job would regularly send them to both cities in the same day. Apparently many companies located between them so they could easily serve both.
    - bradknowles 2y ago
      You can’t just look at distance and judge. I knew guys who lived north of Baltimore but commuted every day to the Pentagon. That doesn’t make Baltimore and DC two parts of the same city. Just like there are people who commute from New York to London, or vice-versa. NyLon is a thing, but that still doesn’t make them two parts of the same city.
      - Retric 2y ago
        Same city is irrelevant, same metro area based on how people behave is what matters. People commuting from downtown Baltimore to DC have a faster commute than many living in well recognized DC suburbs. That’s very different than NyLon.
        bradknowles 2y ago
        Distance is irrelevant. I lived there. The cultures of DC and Baltimore are fundamentally different. Related, yes. But not the same.
        Retric 2y ago
        The culture of poor parts of DC is vastly different than the culture of places 2 streets away. Culture is ultra local.
        bradknowles 2y ago
        Culture is fractal, and happens on many different levels. And there are many types of stratifications of culture. And those stratifications can happen in multiple dimensions at the same time. But culture can also refer to a larger conglomeration of smaller cultures, or components of smaller cultures. Just like a meal or dinner from one place can have many different components, and be differently prepared from a meal or dinner of the same overall type from some other place. There are components that may be shared between them, and there might be components that are different. But even if you start out with the exact same components in both places, the end result may be radically different, simply due to the different methods and the different people involved. In the case of DC versus Baltimore, it’s the larger scale differences that I’m talking about.
  - acjohnson55 2y ago
    Having lived in Baltimore, it's juuust far enough from DC to not be a twin city.
    - pooper 2y ago
      Just out of curiosity, how far is far enough? As a thought experiment, would a shinkansen running every six minutes change this?
      - jfengel 2y ago
        Instead of a shinkasen running every six minutes, we get a low-speed train that runs about once an hour, and only during working hours. If you work past 8 PM you're going to have to find another way home. I don't really know what's far enough, but culturally they consider themselves entirely distinct. People from one almost never work in the other; the trains that do exist are for bringing people from the suburbs. Even those suburbs are fairly distinct. There's a dividing line at Columbia, MD where people go both directions, and nearly everybody else affiliates themselves with one city or the other. Another way to look at it: they have separate sports teams. They're not even rivals, because they play in different leagues. Within the city fans are pretty exclusive, and the other city's teams aren't of interest. Maybe that would change if it were possible to live in one and work in the other, or if they commonly shared night-life or restaurants or leisure. Instead, the other city is a full-day trip, not a jaunt across town.
        massysett 2y ago
        None of what’s in this comment or others reflects my experience at all. I work in DC and have had many colleagues who live in downtown Baltimore and Baltimore suburbs, even suburbs north of Baltimore. They have been Orioles fans. Some have driven, others take commuter rail. I live in a suburb that is closer to DC but the commuter pattern on the highway reflects traffic flow to the Baltimore area in the morning and away from it in the evening. My wife and I work in downtown DC and we live closer to DC than Baltimore, but we routinely attend cultural and recreational events in Baltimore and of course fly from the Baltimore airport. We had memberships in the National Aquarium (in Baltimore) and have taken our kids to the Maryland Zoo. They have never been to the National Zoo in DC. Baltimore and DC are absolutely one metro, just like Dallas/Fort Worth and Minneapolis/Saint Paul. That two cities have distinct identities doesn’t mean they aren’t one metro.
  - bradknowles 2y ago
    They expanded the CSA to include Baltimore so as to reduce the average salary rate, and thus they didn’t have to pay for COLA wage increases. From late 1989 to mid 1998, I lived in various parts of Northern Virginia and the Capitol region of Maryland, and made many trips to Baltimore. Totally not the same metro.
nox101 2y ago
Looking at that list there are probably 100s of "metro areas" with > 1m Look at the UN 2019 population estimates and sort by it. The last 10 areas are 5.49m, 5.49m, 5.38m, 5.38, 5.30m, 5.21m, 5.16m, 5.09m, 5.05m, 5.02m Given how curves like this usually go there's an extremely long tail to get to 1m Concepcion has only ~200k people with <1m metro. Looking at a map of the city and with only 200k people it doesn't seem big
- graeme 2y ago
  A fair point. This list has 468 above 1 million and I think that's the urban boundaries and not metro I hadn't actually googled concepcion, 200,000 in the urban area is quite small. It would be interesting to somehow workout the percentile of population living in a larger/smaller place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_with_over_one_million_inhabitants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_with_over_one_m...

SkyPuncher 2y ago

In my book, 1M people is when a city starts to become a “proper” city. It’ll host major events, invest in public transit (beyond bus), have extensive infrastructure, have extremely thorough airport service, likely have many walkable neighborhoods, and generally feel like a city. Under 1M and the city center tends to be very small with most people driving from the suburbs.

nox101 2y ago
We're talking metro area, not city. If the city is 1M, it's metro area is likely 1.5 to 3 million. If the metro area is 1m then the city is probably 750k to 350k people. The post above said "The Concepción metro area is 1 million people" which means the city itself is much smaller. In fact, Wikipedia says it's 200k people, 1m metro area
- noduerme 2y ago
  Just a quibble about the metro to city population ratio... I think it's usually a lot higher than 1.5 or 3 to 1. Portland where I live has a population of around 650k (city) and 2.6M (metro). So about 4:1. And it's one of the less spread out metro areas in the US. The LA metro has about 18.5M and the city itself about 4M. Chicago is also about 4:1. NYC is the exception at closer to 2.5:1. Just having grown up in LA (the city), I think there's a cognitive bias in these places against recognizing just how freakin large they are when you live there. There are large corners of my home metro area I've never been to at all, whose people I would almost never interact with... and I say that as a former taxi driver! Of course, taxi driving in LA was always balkanized so you'd need separate licenses to pick up in this or that suburb... very Snow Crash-like even in the 90s.
Barrin92 2y ago
>Under 1M and the city center tends to be very small with most people driving from the suburbs. That's a very US or modern Asian city view. In my corner of the world, the Rhine-Ruhr area and the Franco/German/Benelux region almost all cities are < 1 million but you'd be hard pressed to not call Ghent or Rotterdam[1] or Düsseldorf a proper city. [1]https://t0.gstatic.com/licensed-image?q=tbn:ANd9GcR5dl_qfScoQ4vSD1LUAwHIXPdaHyS8rkQ7H1x7RbPgndyMNQ4O_SOICHdcpW3NWau8 https://t0.gstatic.com/licensed-image?q=tbn:ANd9GcR5dl_qfSco...

throwaway2037 2y ago

Jesus. What a post. 15-30 million? Where? There aren't that many on the planet.

39896880 2y ago
I suspect Shenzhen for one
lazide 2y ago
China and India both have tons of places that meet that criteria.
com2kid 2y ago
Traveling around China, their sense of scale it pretty much 10x what America's is. 1 million is barely a city, around 5 million and you are a 2nd tier city, hit 8+ million and you are a "real city". Meanwhile people in America are arguing that they are worried their "100k town is going to add 5000 people and become an urban hellscape!"
- dayjaby 2y ago
  I visited a 8 million pop city. They had barely any foreign restaurants and my Chinese colleagues look down on me to have only visited a "small city".

nox101 2y ago

To all the downvotes, did you look at a map of Concepción? It's small. It's 200k people. It's "metro area" (the 1m) is spread out.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

latentsea 2y ago

As someone who lives in a city with 1.5 million people... growing up I felt pretty underwhelmed by our downtown and you can indeed pass through it in a few blocks. The first time I went to Tokyo I felt like I was in a real city. But then again, it's one of the largest cities on earth, so of course it feels like a real city. Though cities like mine are far more common.