List of metropolitan areas covering the entire country

[bandit957]

A project 34 years in the making shall now be deemed complete to my satisfaction!

Many years ago, when looking at standard reference books for high school assignments, I thought of what it would be like if official definitions of metropolitan areas covered every county in the 50 states and D.C. - not just those closest to the central cities.

Perhaps the biggest driver of this interest was radio, since rating services like Arbitron used government definitions as a basis for their own metropolitan areas, with some modifications. From time to time, I came up with some rather rough definitions of my own to cover every county, but none of them seemed very accurate.

Now I think we can finally settle on a real set of definitions. I used FreeBASIC to process databases of county-to-county commuting data and other factors to create something consistent and believable. This is not specifically for radio but rather more for general purposes. However, this is not a list I intend to keep modifying, so I use data from the 2000 census and the resulting roster of official metropolitan areas as the reference point. (This is despite the fact that I was skipped by that census.) My new list is retconned to have applied in the 1970s and shall be deemed to apply today.

So read it and peep...

http://bunkerblast.info/newmetros.html

[Bruce]

Just quickly looking at the Washington list, quite a few are questionable due to the distances involved. Separating out Bremerton from Seattle like the Census Bureau does looks especially silly when Island and San Juan are added to the latter. Wenatchee's influence definitely does not extend all the way up through Okanogan County, and neither does Spokane reach all the way to Ferry County.

[NWI_Irish96]

I used FreeBASIC to process databases of county-to-county commuting data and other factors to create something consistent and believable.

Other than Census data, not sure where your county-to-county commuting data would come from and why it would produce different results.

I use data from the 2000 census and the resulting roster of official metropolitan areas as the reference point. (This is despite the fact that I was skipped by that census.)

There was a national publicity campaign explaining how to ensure you were counted in the 2020 Census and also a thread on this board detailing as much. If you were skipped by the 2020 Census you were either living in a cave for several months or deliberately trying to be skipped.

[bandit957]

There were inevitably going to be counties on this list that are not near any big population centers.