Quote:
Originally Posted by JManc
That's kind of like the (San Francisco) Bay Area. Strictly speaking, it's not an actual metro area (it's two, SF and San Jose) but for all intents and purposes, it acts as one.
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It's actually made up of 5 metro areas:
SF/Oakland (SF, Alameda, San Mateo, Contra Costa, Marin counties)
SJ (Santa Clara, San Benito counties)
Vallejo (Solano county)
Santa Rosa (Sonoma county)
Napa (Napa county)
Basically, census methodology doesn't work well with polycentric cities where development is broken up by terrain. It measures commuters well, but doesn't do a good job describing the actual extent of "the city". Those 5 metros share a common identity as part of the "Bay Area", share public transit, media markets, infrastructure, culture, etc, and in the case of SF/Oakland and SJ, are also connected by unbroken development, on both sides of the bay...but the census keeps trying to tell us that it's actually 5 separate metro areas lol. If you live in the Vallejo or Santa Rosa or Napa MSAs, you understand that you're living in a suburban area of SF/Oakland/SJ (same deal in suburban parts of the SF/Oakland MSA in relation to SJ, and suburban parts of the SJ MSA in relation to SF/Oakland), or at least that you're well inside the sphere of influence of the Bay Area, if you live way out at the far edge of those counties.
The CSA adds four more metros, but they're not traditionally part of the Bay Area and have more of their own identity:
Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz county)
Stockton (San Joaquin county)
Modesto (Stanislaus county)
Merced (Merced county)