The metro area could be described as LA County excluding the A.V., Ventura County along the 101 corridor west up until Ventura, Orange County down south to San Clemente, the I.E. up until Beaumont to the east and perhaps Riverside/Perris Valley to the south, excluding Victor Valley. About 17 million people across a wide area of sprawl, vast majority of which are dependent on auto-centric. There's a limit to how much sprawl can push outwards; usually, 60 min from nodal centers by car seems to be the limit. Because of this, despite large amounts of uninhabited land in the Inland Empire, the amount of actually useful developable land is running out in Southern California, since very few people in their right mind are going to do 2-hour 1-way commutes from the far fringes of the Inland Empire to Downtown LA or Orange County. Hence, slowing population growth in Southern California; Greater LA will likely break 20 million people in the next few decades, but that will probably be the upper limit as to how much it can grow while still being predominantly autocentric. Any future growth in the region will have to involve a radical reimagining in how the bulk of people in the region live and move, either in densifying the inner urban cores, or expanding rail networks to service more flung out areas more effectively.

^^^ “The Limits of Sprawl”

Would make to be a stunning urban documentary. Or melodrama.

I think even without the geographical constraints L.A. was going to soon approach the limit of being wieldy as a car centric metro. Is there another example of an auto centric metro area in the world even remotely close to L.A.'s size?

Houston or DFW will be larger than LA in urban surface area.

I agree, 60 minutes is nearing the upper limit that most people are willing to do, there are a lot of people in SoCal that will go even farther though. Another thing is, because we're multi nodal, you can live in sprawly Riverside County and commute to your job in North County SD, OC, parts of LA County in under an hour. North County SD residents can commute to parts of OC faster than they can to DTSD and John Wayne airport is sometimes easier to get to than SAN. The limitations to sprawl in Southern California has been mountain ranges and water resources/supply and the infrastructure to get that water to areas without water. It takes a lot of time and money to get all the infrastructure in place.

Carlsbad (north county SD) to Irvine (OC) is a 55 minute drive right now.
Perris (new sprawly-ville) to Irvine (OC), 55 minute drive.

But it is these areas of developable uninhabited land in the inland empire / Riverside County that is and has been the fastest growing area of Southern California. It grew last year, LA MSA shrank. There are freeways, MetroLink and Ontario Airport to serve the area that is filling up with new housing, shopping plazas and employment centers.

we still don't have 2020 UA data yet, but here's the 2010 data for the 10 largest US UAs in terms of land area:

New York: 8,936.0 sq. miles
Atlanta: 6,851.4 sq. miles
Chicago: 6,326.7 sq. miles
Los Angeles: 5,907.8 sq. miles
Philadelphia: 5,131.7 sq. miles
Boston: 4,852.2 sq. miles
Dallas: 4,607.9 sq. miles
Houston: 4,299.4 sq. miles
Detroit: 3,463.2 sq. miles
Washington: 3,423.3 sq. miles



and if you wanna combine the LA UA with the Riverside UA of 545.0 sq. miles (as californians typically insist), then you get a total land area of 6,452.8 sq. miles, putting LA/Riverside just ahead of chicagoland.

I'm thinking the UA is missing a lot of surface area of DFW? I agree with you that it's a better measurement in most other ways when trying to determine the size of a metro area though.

I meant L.A.'s size by population. At some point it becomes unwieldy to have that many people moving around in personal cars as a primary mode of transportation.

Metro LA is dense. Fast forward 50 years from now and Houston and DFW will fill in, not to LA type density but maybe closer to SD density.
The densest metro in the US in 2010.

LA UA population density: 6,174 people per square mile
NY: 5,318
SD: 4,037
Chicago: 3,524
Houston: 2,978
DFW: 2,878

Counterpoint: a metro area will eventually hit a limit on geographic size, but it will spawn new edge cities that feed off the region’s population. It will grow leapfrog style.

This is because some economic activities like logistics would have a different definition of what’s “close by” versus an office commuter. Also some might want to still be close enough to do a one-off meeting or a fun day trip even if they aren’t near enough to come in daily. Plus the mere presence of people creates jobs on the edge and people who do those jobs aren’t reliant on going into the urban core.

As it is now, in DFW the far north suburbs are actually more oriented around the Plano-Frisco corridor and have less to do with the CBD.

Likewise I’m sure that Riverside-San Bernardino are the true separate metro the census bureau recognizes them to be, though I’ve never visited these places.

I was meaning more the actual city borders as opposed to the metro, so something like East LA (unincorporated) and it being part of LA at some point.

"Fastest growing places (min. 25k) in California, 2000-2020:
1. Beaumont (366%)
2. Lincoln (344%)
3. Vineyard CDP (335%)
4. Elk Grove (194%)
5. El Dorado Hills CDP (181%)

Reverse:
1. Huntington Park (-11%)
2. Maywood (-10%)
3. Bell Gardens (-10%)
4. Bell (-8%)
5. Santa Ana (-8%)"



@SidKhurana3607

Not surprising about Elk Grove. It's a fast growing sprawling suburb of Sacramento. Lots of cheap housing there. Seems like a lot of people are moving there from the Bay Area.

I wonder if LA is due to geographical constraints; i.e., mountains on one end and the ocean on the other. Though the Bay Area (outside SF) is more sprawly despite similar geography. Much of Silicon Valley is like a Houston suburb.

The Bay is far more geographically constrained. It has giant bay (as wide as 12 miles in some areas) splitting it, resulting in two 2-4 mile wide strips of developable land, that eventually converges in the South Bay, so it's not really a good comparison geographically to the LA basin. If the Bay was entirely filled in and developed, then yeah maybe.

And while both do have the ocean and mountain ranges on either side, the Santa Cruz mountains take up a huge amount of space in the Peninsula, whereas in LA it's flat and sandy along the entire coastline, aside from a small area around Rancho Palos Verdes. So LA can sprawl from mountain literally up to the beach, whereas the Bay cannot. And then in the East Bay, there's the Diablo mountains. The Santa Cruz and Diablo range meet in Morgan Hill/Gilroy, and along with the Bay, basically allows for development to only occur in an area that resembles a claw shape. If you go for hikes along these ridges, you'll see that along with the Marin Headlands, part of the Norther Coast range, the ridgeline basically forms a ring around the Bay.

Similar in that they both have water and mountains hemming them in but yeah the Bay Area has the bay. I noticed that about Fremont; only five or so miles wide...mountains pretty close to the east and the smelly bay to the west.

Interestingly if you filled in the bay and overlaid the LA basin over it, it’d have a similar shape of development. Without the bay it’d probably look very similar overall. A giant sprawly basin.

So the fastest declining are all Hispanic suburbs. Obviously smaller household sizes due to greater immigration restrictions.

All the out of state folks say California is unaffordable, yet large swaths are.
My county is the most affordable in the entire state!

This also contributes to the Bay Area's traffic, as there are fewer alternate routes because of the Bay.

The LA basin has more alternate freeways and surface streets. Lakewood-Rosemead Blvd. can be a great alternate if there's an accident on the 605 or 710; Venice Blvd. can be a great alternate to the 10; Sepulveda or La Cienega to Slauson or La Tijera can be a good alternate to LAX... etc.