It's still difficult to know which "2nd biggest cities in their state" are still on the "most populous cities" list. Spokane, WA, is over 200,000, but just shy of making this list. Plus, the city proper skews things a bit. I mean, Miami has a metro population over 5M, but not even a tenth that in the city proper. Fun quiz, though.
I'm from Virginia too and couldn't get Chesapeake. The Newport News area has so many different municipalities I started to lose track. I honestly would've assumed the second-largest city would be Richmond, not another NN city.
Jacksonville is literally 21 times the land size of Miami and only the 4th largest urban area. Property tax greed makes for a lot of separate municipal boundaries in the U.S.
Remember, about 50 years ago, Jacksonville "consolidated" with Duval County - the county that once contained it. It's huge, both by population and land area.
I honestly have nothing against Pennsylvania, yet this is like the third USA quiz in a row where I've completely forgotten PA exists. What is going on.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, I hate using city proper. It's so arbitrary and artificial. Any listing that ranks San Antonio above Dallas is clearing devoid of any real world meaning (nothing against San Antonio, but it is obviously a smaller city than Dallas).
San Antonio is a very large city. According to the census data I found the top three Texas cities by city proper, in order are Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas. Going by metro area, they are Dallas-Arlington-Ft. Worth, Houston-Galveston, and San Antonio. San Antonio is dear to my heart because attending a wedding there of a college friend is what prompted my now-husband to propose to me. There was magic in the air of that beautiful city on that special day in the 1970s.
I think this quiz is need for an update. I saw you are using the 2015 estimates, the 2016 estimates would change Memphis to the second biggest instead of Nashville.
So hard to pick which cities cover their urban area and which have boundaries of a tiny inner core (it's a compete guess, actually). For example, San Francisco is obviously second to Los Angeles, but there's been a small boundary drawn for one of those two that leave San Diego as an answer here.
Actually, San Jose would come after San Diego, since it has a population of over 1 million, while San Francisco hovers at just under 900,000. Given its location, it cannot grow much and is unlikely to incorporate other cities from the peninsula, so it can really only grow upward.
It's a mega suburb of Vegas on the east side of the metro. Since probably close to 95% of the tourists of Vegas never leave the strip and downtown people are generally ignorant of it. Additionally since the vast majority of people arriving by car come from California they never see it either. It was/is just about the most urban sprawliest cities in the US as well. It only had about 50k people in 1990. When Vegas boomed it did as well and when the real estate market went belly up in 2008/9 it had a really high number of foreclosures rivaling a lot of cities of California.
As mentioned previously, St. Louis metro area is larger, but not city proper. St. Louis City is surrounded by St. Louis County and the Mississippi River, and cannot increase its boundaries.
I detest the American system of “city proper” - it’s a complete misrepresentation of an actual urban areas population, which affects its character, importance etc. So saying London is bigger than LA with regards to “city proper” is not really relevant, where as they are actually similar sizes when the whole urban area is considered at around 10-15 million.
Yeah, I don't understand it much either. It does majorly confuse suburbs with cities. But I guess because each 'city' has its own separate police and fire etc departments, Americans take 'city limits' and designations more seriously?
City limits is surely the dominant representation method in Europe. Why would you invent a completly new and more or less arbitrary measurement like "Metro area", when you could just use proper city limits and then stack them together as needed?
America definitely got weird with the evolution of suburbs. Places that used to be different cities because it would take a couple of hours horse ride are now connected by a 30-minute bus ride with no gaps in urban sprawl.
An outsider, like me in Canada, will look at Los Angeles and be like, oh that's all the same. But then meet somebody that says, I am not from LA, I am from Anaheim... Long Beach...Inglewood... Compton...
I wouldn't say that this is unique to the US in the least. An outside visitor to Vancouver would see Burnaby/Surrey/Richmond/Delta/Coquitlam as just an extension of Metro Vancouver. Same with Victoria and Saanich, Montreal/Dorval/Longueuil/Brossard/Laval, Toronto and its ring of a half dozen subsidiary cities. Cities that have actually expanded their borders to cover all of their edge cities and suburbs are only really a thing in the Prairie provinces. Elsewhere in Canada, there really is the same pattern of former independent cities and newly founded exurbs being absorbed by an expanding metropolis while remaining legally independent, and metro regions that do not match city proper populations.
Maybe you cowards, who are complaining about 'city proper', compared to the metro, should move to the city proper rather than hiding in the suburbs with your false sense of securities.
I have a feeling that a lot of cities are going to take a pretty big hit, population wise, in the next couple of years thanks to Coronavirus / rioting.
Increasing taxes is another reason. Not sure if it will be enough to make an appreciable difference in population, but they should be thankful the census was already taken before the exodus began.
The only three big areas in Virginia are the Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Chesapeake-Newport News-Hampton area in the Southeast, the Richmond area, and all the stuff in NoVa near DC. Everything else is either a college town or farmland.
Missed 8 of them. Was typing Memphis as time expired after Nashville didn't work. Tried Montgomery and not Huntsville, several in NJ but not Jersey city, Tacoma and not Spokane, Reno and not Henderson. Tried Richmond thinking it was second to VA Beach. Also missed Madison and Grand Rapids.
Yeah before I came to JetPunk, I always thought Montgomery was larger than Huntsville, Reno was larger than Henderson, Richmond was larger than Chesapeake, Saint Louis was larger than Kansas City, and San Francisco was larger than San Diego. But that’s city proper. I guess a lot of people are used to taking quizzes that use urban area (thanks a lot, citypopulation.de) and they don’t do well on city proper quizzes.
City limits is surely the dominant representation method in Europe. Why would you invent a completly new and more or less arbitrary measurement like "Metro area", when you could just use proper city limits and then stack them together as needed?
An outsider, like me in Canada, will look at Los Angeles and be like, oh that's all the same. But then meet somebody that says, I am not from LA, I am from Anaheim... Long Beach...Inglewood... Compton...
Jersey City: 286,670 (not 262,075)
St. Louis: 286,578 (not 300,576)
Could explain the city order.