It's unfortunate that these are (or at least appear to me to be) raw counts, rather than percentages, normalized by each metro area's population or job totals.
They use country-level data for many factors, including for "Inclusivity & Tolerance". Having also lived in both cities, it's clear why this list is flawed.
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 believe that they're basing this data on stats collected by the census, so you have take the city as defined by the census bounds, which aren't necessarily similar to common conceptions of what area is 'in' a city.
They're comparing zip-code level Case-Shiller index based on distance from city center. Metro level (which is what is widely quoted as far as I know) does not get at what they're trying to characterize, which is relative demand for housing in more urban environments.
Seemed like he stopped at a visualization of the data, without any real interpretation.
I'd like to see some information on the density of the areas. For example, Chicago is listed as the metro region (8 million people) when the city itself only has about 3 million, and public transport hardly exists outside the city.
If the total rides had been divided by the city population, it would equal much closer to 200 rides per capita.
So do you believe this article should be disregarded, because it uses data that differs from California's and Chicago's?
Or would you instead prefer to only use the parts of this article that support your position, and replace those that don't with data from California and Chicago that does?
Your commment implies they were cherry-picking the data, which isn't true. They only included data that could definitively be marked as within Seattle vs outside Seattle.
Not helping: I think they've done an exceptionally poor job of clarifying how they defined the metropolitan areas. For example, the label for the data in the Boston area (lifted off the map, which was the only place I could find the slightest mention) is "Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH". Grouping MA and NH?! Conversely, Riverside and Los Angeles are separated despite covering a similar geographic range. I'd love to see the geographic regions in this study shown as polygons on a map, along with some sense of the total population per region.
reply