Agreed, 100% (and thanks for clarifying your point, earlier). The way our country measures and understands itself is one of those things you should be able to take for granted, so it also seems plainly logical and patriotic to fight for more accurate and useful techniques instead of being content with something good enough -especially when we are losing opportunities in the real world because of poor methods.
So, back to my original question, how do we do that?
I think your suggestion of using more holistic inputs to define metros and MSAs makes sense and is a compelling vision. But is it enough to have just another rule change like this time, or would that take another system overhaul like in 2003? Iām worried that both of those things would take substantial amounts of grassroots organizing (and Iām worried itāll be ignored again if it comes just from the Triangle), and the efforts required are unclear but different between those two approaches.
The messages would have to be very targeted and specific to how the OMB wants 'em, too. Towards the end of the federal replies to comments about the latest rule changes, it seemed to me that the Standards Review Committee basically talked down at everyone who wrote about broader impacts rather than sticking to just statistical concerns. This went so far as to suggest that the OMB promote that mission instead of trying to appreciate where the people theyāre serving are coming from. Weād have to overcome that hurdle to have a census analysis system thatās more fair to the Triangle, but Iām not sure what we can do to do that.
Frankly, I am suspicious how the commuting metrics are actually being used. Using MIami for example, Iām having a hard time believing that Broward sends 25% of its commuters to MiamiDade or vice versa. I mean, Broward is nearly 2 million people and MIamiDade is nearly 2.7 million. Am I to believe that 25% of either of their commuters go into the other county? I have my doubts.
There has to be a level of lobbying that goes into this as well, and Iāve heard stories for years that Durham did just that prior to the 2003 MSA changes. As the story goes, they wanted their own MSA . I donāt knowā¦
I dug around the Census Bureauās website a bit, and if I understood their guidelines correctly, it doesnāt matter that Broward or Palm Beach counties donāt meet the 25% commute threshold. Thatās because that rules applies for outlying counties -but thereās a separate rule for the core metro. From the Federal Register:
I think this means a countyās automatically a part of an MSA if itās a part of an āurban areaā that the Urban Areas Program recognizes. Thatās important because the Census Bureauās definition for the Miami urban area includes Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. This is why they get to count those outlying cities as a part of their MSA regardless of commute patterns, I think.
In comparison, the Raleigh urban area is defined to include Raleigh, Cary, and other municipalities mostly in Wake County, whereas Durhamās includes itself, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and Hillsborough. As long as these urban areas are defined separately, I think weāre bound to continue seeing our MSAs being separated too.
Also, you're right: if the two other counties in the metro area alongside Miami-Dade had to also meet that 25% criteria, they shouldn't have been considered a part of the MSA. (click to see why!)
That means about 15.6% of Broward residents commute to Miami-Dade, compared to 6.1% going the other way.
Full disclaimer: Iāve never been to Miami before, and aside from hearsay from friends and news articles, Iām not familiar at all with what the experience of living there is like. That means Iām not sure if this matches the gut feelings of people who actually live there, so I have no idea if this data seems like obvious BS.
With that said, their local news outlets and government agencies donāt seem to find anything wrong with that idea:
EDIT: The Census Bureau updates its definition of urban areas every decade, and weāre due for the 2020 update soon. Theyāve been talking about updating how they define core urban areas in a more objective and automated way, and one of those factors is automatically including contiguous census blocks will a certain amount of density in residents. Since more people have been moving to southeastern Durham, Cary, Morrisville, and Brier Creek, I wonder if that could lay the foundations for an eventually reunified metro area (and therefore, MSA)?
Thanks for the sleuthing and subsequent report!
The UA designation is an interesting angle to consider, and as luck would have it, the Triangle is constrained there too due to the pinch point created by the watersheds of two reservoirs (Jordan & Falls), Umstead Park, RDU, and RTP proper. All of these entities constrict the number of people who live in the contiguous tracts one would need to fulfill the requirement for a single UA.
While one might think that thereās no hope for a singular UA, there is at least one global resource thatās been reporting the Triangleās UA as one more recently.
That resource is Demographia. http://www.demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf
See Table 2 on page 7. They have combined Raleigh and Durham into a single UA. They actually did this a few years ago. You can also refer to Table 4, pages 11 and 15. They report the Raleigh urban area as 1,522,000 and ranked 357 in the World (page 27).
actually we didnāt. We lost the AA hub right as Nashville lost their AA hub when AA bought most of Eastern Airlinesā international routes hubbed out of Miami in a chance-of-a-lifetime sale. The sudden Miami hub made Nashville and RDU both obsolete in the mid 1990s due to the unanticipated Miami hub being dropped in AAās lap. But it had nothing to do with Charlotte or Raleigh or population issues, or even air traffic numbers at RDU.
CLT as a hub already existed at the time for a completely different airline, USAirways, that had nothing to do with RDU or Nashville hubs, and had been a hub the all the way back to the early 80ās with Piedmont.
When AA and USAirways merged 20+ years later, they added their hubs together, none were cut, and as a result CLT is now an AA hub rather than a USAir hub. We definitely didnāt lose anything to Charlotte, if anything we lost it to Miami due to a fluke. Really it was more about airline stuff than population things. Sorry to get off track, itās just I know a little bit about this flying stuff.
True, though RDU (but not Umstead Park) and parts of RTP are a part of the Raleigh urban area, and Raleigh and Durhamās urban areas already touch each other in Brier Creek and near the Cisco headquarters. Hereās RTP according to Durhamās 2010 official urban area map. Note that the two urban areas already touched each other -and back then, the NC147-540 connection wasnāt even open yet, and mixed-use developments like Hub RTP and Park Point were just pipe dreams!
I wonder if you could flip your logic about constricted census tracts on its head? If we have non-residential obstacles that geographically limit where Raleigh and Durham can come together to potentially unify, I think the opposite is true too: you could make a better case for unifying the two urban areas if there were more people living in those limited numbers of census tracts, and their residents often commuted to their non-home urban areas.
Translation: I feel like we could make a much stronger statistical case to unify the Triangle if we:
annex land, then build more densely in specific census tracts in Brier Creek, northern Morrisville/Cary, and southeastern Durham
incentivize residents of those areas in each county to commute to the other (through convenient public transit?)
Based on the decade-old map, it seems like the tracts we should target are... (click me!)
Wake County census tracts:
536.01 (between NC-55 and the Chatham County border)
536.09 (between NC-54 and I-40, including Perimeter Park)
536.10 (Brier Creek)
ā¦and Durham County tracts:
18.09 (south of Glenwood Av., up to the East End Connector)
20.28 (between RTP and 540, including Top Golf and the Umstead Hotel)
9801 (the Durham part of RTP)
20.27 (NC-55, up to I-40)
Notice that many of those tracts have become the new home of tons of businesses only in the last decade, too, so weāve already been making progress on this front. So if weāre lucky, maybe weāre on our way to have a solid case for a revised definition by the next census -especially if the idea for better buses between downtown Cary and RTP can move forward, and encourage more transit-oriented developments?
re:Demographia - Itās good to know that some demographers are putting in the effort to combine Durham and Raleigh into a single statistical entry (and Iām sure @Boltman feels vindicated there lol). I have to imagine thatās more of the exception than the norm, though, so it would be reeeeeally nice if the Census Bureau took a better look at their unintended consequencesā¦
The way I read this is that they recommend continuing to use commuting Data to measure intercounty connectivity. issues regarding merging of adjacent MSAās are included in the five- year (mid-decade) update, or the Decennial Delineation which includes all changes. The next Decennial Delineation is in June 2023, the next Five-Year update is in 2028.
Yeah, I didnāt see anything specific to Raleigh-Durham in the rulemaking text. Theyāll apply the rules at the next decadal update, and everyone will get changed (or not) at the same time.
Given that under their old rules and with the old data, the two MSAs should be combined, thereās still no reason to think they wonāt be in the future.
Ironically, itās in the sprawl of west Cary and south Durham, and northwest Raleigh and southeast Durham that will likely reunite the Triangle into a single entity.
All that matters is if we want ANYTHING are metros need to be merged our urban area might save us hopefully. When we are merged we can breathe a sigh of relief.
All that matters is if we want ANYTHING our metro the Raleigh-Cary and Durham-Chapel Hill to need to be remerged after that we can all breathe a sigh of relief. This is a crucial decade for us. This is a crucial decade for us.
Just in Raleigh, 10 years ago the population was around 400,000. Now, its population jumped about 15 percent, to around 467,000. The statistics are the latest findings by Moodyās Analytics (and reported by WRAL).
