I just watched a video that said new York city had a population of 8.8 million as of the 2020 census but had a metro population of over 26 million? I don’t really understand where they got that 26 million from. Another example, LA, had a population of around 3.8 million but a metro population of over 9 million. Where do they get those metro area figures from?
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A good way I have heard it described is the Metropolitan area is the blob of lights that you see when you look out the plane window at night.
But basically it’s the continuous urban area that is a city and its suburbs.
It varies city by city and country by country.
Some of the confusion can come from the fact that for example “The City of Los Angeles” is just a local government area in the middle of a much bigger urban area that doesn’t just stop at the government boundary.
i’m thinking it’s including folks that live in suburban areas and commute in to the city to work and get groceries and such. Houston Texas’s metro area is as near as makes no difference, 9500 square miles. and i give it only a few more years and it gets even bigger. including more towns to the east until it’s all the way to beaumont and then the louisiana border. houston is in construction of a ring road that encircles an area as big as dc to baltimore. [https://s.hdnux.com/photos/42/31/35/9017196/3/1200×0.jpg](https://s.hdnux.com/photos/42/31/35/9017196/3/1200×0.jpg) the blue bit is the texas state highway 99. the bit missing is where the road has yet to cross the ship channel. anyway, the actual metro area is far bigger than that. but that ring road makes commuting pretty easy. until you get into the 610 loop, the smallest loop. traffic just sucks inside of that area.
Most major cities have suburbs. These towns aren’t technically part of the city and have their own local government, but are physically connected to the city. Many of the jobs and much of the commerce in these suburbs depend on the major city. Adding the city’s population to all the connected suburban populations creates the metro area total.
‘metro’ stands for ‘metropolitan’. It means ‘mother city’, and implies the presence of ‘children cities’. These children are very close to the mother, and are all grouped together for some purposes.
The 26 million people who all live in a cluster around the local government area called “New York City” don’t mostly get their services from the “New York City” government, because they live in “smalltown”. But they do identify with it, they can see it from their homes, they might commute to work in it (or know people who do), they might get services from it (for example leisure, or culture), and when they’re talking to someone from somewhere else, who might not know where “smalltown” is, it’s easier for them to say “I’m from New York”.
A metro area is all those children clustered together. The figures from come amalgamating all of them, and treating them like a single unit.
To add to the other comments, the *reason why* a metro area is useful is that different areas are organized differently. For example, I live in the Boston metro area. Boston proper is actually relatively small: only about 675k people. That population puts it #24 in the country, but it’s because the various municipalities are more fractured than in other cities. Boston is about 48 sq miles in area, but its surrounding cities “feel like” what other cities would just call the outskirts of the city proper.
Some points of comparison:
– Boston is 675k people, 49 sq mi
– Phoenix is 1.66M people, 517 sq mi
– Boston metro is 4.9M people, 4.67k square miles
– Phoenix metro is 4.9M people, 14.5k sq mi
So if you looked at just the cities, you’d conclude that Boston is significantly smaller than Phoenix; but when you look at the metro areas, you see that they’re roughly the same in population, with Phoenix a lot more spread out.
Of those two perspectives, the second is the one most people would instinctively say feels right.
Or to put it visually, look at this (just randomly pulled from google images): https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/tGR_ha5-stKsP4IDMTfHqIxZqBU=/0x0:2048×1315/620×413/filters:focal(861×495:1187×821):format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/58607531/14000848519_cad422a1a3_k.0.jpg . Only the lower part of the picture (below the river) is actually Boston, so the metro area captures what it’s like to live in the picture as a whole.
One of the better examples I like to do is look at the map of the US at night. You can see the lights around the cities. Take Detroit for example, people would expect Michigan to be dark because of Detroit, but nope, everywhere outside of the city is extremely bright, that’s metro Detroit.
Metro areas are usually determined by orientation to the central big city… things like continuous urban/suburban development, percentage of residents of a city/country that commute into or toward the main city, media reach for local TV, radio, newspaper consumption. Big cities are surrounded by dozens, even hundreds of suburbs that are not part of the city proper but still part of its sphere of influence.
Metro includes suburban and area around the city. Montreal, the island, has a population of X, but with the north and south shores, that population is Y
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