Just a note to say that this is an awkward construction. The OMB defines Metropolitan Statistical Areas and Combined Statistical Areas, but nothing called Combined MSA, which seems to be a conflation of the two.
> But I've found the 'Metropolitan Stockholm' number is seldom used as well, but looking at the definitions it should be more common.
The county (region, or formerly "län") is the area responsible for healthcare so it's natural that this area is used for all things healthcare related.
The methodology is highly suspect. They chose 50 of the most populated cities that had data available. Not the 50 most populated cities that had data available.
I think last link is the wrong data to use. Despite the title of the article, it is using the largest possible "Combined statistical area" that contains the city, rather than anything commonly known as the metro area.
> A combined statistical area (CSA) is composed of adjacent metropolitan (MSA) and micropolitan statistical areas (µSA) in the United States and Puerto Rico that can demonstrate economic or social linkage. The OMB defines a CSA as consisting of various combinations of adjacent metropolitan and micropolitan areas with economic ties measured by commuting patterns.
For instance, the "Washington-Baltimore-Arlington, DC-MD-VA-WV-PA Combined Statistical Area" (which is not part of the top 5 cities) includes all of Hampshire County, West Virginia
> A review of the Top 10 most populous U.S. cities indicates only half of them have obtained .gov domains, including Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio, and San Diego.
Thanks for the feedback and for checking out the site!
We are considering expanding the reference column to have more options, including population and CBSA (core-based statistical area). This would also align with some of the aggregate data available from the EEOC. For example, companies could be compared against the "New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA Metropolitan Statistical Area".
There's a genuinely hard problem in trying to define discrete but sufficiently meaningful localities. People really like clean dichotomies, but locality is fractal.
I just pasted my original code with properly indenting in here, so I thought to remove ugliness once I copied it pastebin.
Also I saw some small city in california 'Los something...' with population of 28k which didn't get caught by the first function that only lists 50 most populous cities so I wrote the second one that includes every town in US.
On the other hand, the New York Times quiz can end up giving a list of random suburbs that don't have much of an identity fo their own. I think either counties or metro areas are the right level of granularity here. (You'd have to come up with some way to partition the non-metropolitan places.)
(I live just outside Atlanta. That is more meaningful, for someone relocating here, than saying that I live in Georgia or that I live in the particular town I live in.)
I do wonder if there's any real demand for customizable versions of this - allowing you to choose which variables matter to you - or if it's just something that people play with.
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