Megaregions: Fresh Look At The Functional Economic Geography Of The United States
National Geographic had a great story recently about an analysis done by Garrett Nelson of Dartmouth College and Alasdair Rae of the University of Sheffield, who came up with an economically functional map of the United States based on analyzing a commute dataset and organized them into what they saw as megaregions.
These Regions Are Different From What One Is Used To In Terms Of Geography Alone.
If you are a startup hoping to expand across the US, you need to understand the US in terms of these megaregions and what is unique to each in terms of culture.
For example, when you look at San Francisco as a population center, it is the combined area of San Francisco /San Jose/Oakland/Sacramento which is highly connected based on where people are actually commuting regularly and is thus better visualized as one megaregion.
The map on the above is referred to as just “San Francisco” in the megaregion map below, which has a population of over 10 million.
The map below is the final product of the scientists analyses’ to categorize the top 50 megaregions in the US based on the commute data they looked at and applying other principles:
These are the top 20 most populated megaregions in the US (I took a rough estimate from this Wikipedia article about list of Metropolitan Statistical Areas and transposed with this map):
- New York City: ~20 million
- Los Angeles: ~19 million
- Bay Area-Sacramento: ~10 million
- Chicago: ~10 million
- DC-Baltimore: ~10 million
- Boston New England: ~8 million
- Dallas-Ft Worth: ~7.5 million
- Philly: ~7 million
- Houston: ~7 million
- Miami: ~6.6 million
- Central FL (Tampa + Orlando): ~6.1 million
- Atlanta: ~ 6.3 million
- Detroit-Toledo: ~5.3 million
- Seattle: ~4.6 million
- Phoenix: ~4.5 million
- Twin Cities: ~4 million
- Cleveland: ~3.5 million
- Denver Front Range: ~3.4 million
- San Diego: ~3.3 million
- Portland: ~3.1 million
