Notice how they said very little about Wake in that article? This is despite the fact that Wake had by far the most absolute growth of any county in the entire state. Frankly, Wake has been contributing the most absolute growth of any county for many years now.
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This insidious anti-Wake conspiracy by the closet Chaelotteans in Chapel Hill must be stopped!
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Here is a tool to see a relative population around a point. I think it’s been talked about in the past, but if you place this point over Downtown Raleigh (as central as possible) the population within 5 km is about 112,000. Put that same point around central Uptown Charlotte it’s only about 100,000. Also placing it over Richmond showed there to be about 125,000 and over Downtown Atlanta seems to be 165,000 people. I think it’s just a fun tool to play around with.
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Here an interesting article it looks like are agreeing with us on a merging if Raleigh scary MSA with a Durham Chapel Hill MSA. They’re portioning government I think they’ll listen especially with that urban area news. I’ll really increase our visibility. And there nothing NIMBYs can’t do anything about the government merging us. We have some strong cases in Axios report.
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Bigger picture is always a better thing
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They should definitely be combined, would be a benefit for the whole region.
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The article fails to mention that they were one metro until 2003 when they were split. We are only trying to restore the Triangle’s legacy metro. The same thing happened to the Triad.
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So we urban area where was the link or study on that which would put together.
I’m not sure what you’re asking - translate, perhaps ?
There was a link on the urban area study which is our key to reunification.
The COO of Highwoods wrote this article I believe…
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I don’t believe that the OMB urban areas have been updated in forever.
However, an outfit out of Europe has long since unified Raleigh and Durham UAs per this annual report. http://www.demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf
I’ve posted this previously, but it’s relevant to this discussion again.
The urban area sits at 1.54M and is sandwiched between Columbus, OH and Hampton Roads, VA. Urban areas do not include entire counties, only those with contiguous tracts of a baseline density population. I suspect that Raleigh’s will soon pass Columbus.
FWIW, the OMB urban areas from 2010 are as follows:
Raleigh: 884,891
Durham: 347,602
For comparison, here are some others from 2010.
Charlotte: 1,249,442
Nashville: 969,587
Richmond: 953,556
Virginia Beach: 1,439,666
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This is an interesting and triggering thread on City-Data that highlights just how Raleigh compares to peers using a radius population from central city zip codes. Spoiler Alert: Raleigh isn’t as small as many would like to believe it is when compared to its most referenced peers.
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And with merging Durham-Chapel Hill MSA with the Raleigh-Cary MSA it’ll 4 million radius.
The radius has nothing to do with the MSA designations. It just measures population around the center of Raleigh. I played with the tool a bit and as one might expect, a center around I40 between Cary and Morrisville yields a slightly larger population at 25 miles because it captures more of the Triangle’s key communities. Not surprisingly, a radius around the center of Durham yields a lower number.
In all 3 cases, the circle captures most of the key Triangle municipalities.
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Some of the data is interesting to look into. I guess this also shows the power of having lots of suburbs/exurbs around defined city limits. For example, Austin is less populated than Charlotte on the 25 and 35 mile lists but on every other metric one can find out there just measuring their city limits Austin would be larger than Charlotte population-wise.
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Interestingly, Raleigh and Austin are side by side when looking at the two at 40 miles radius. While I personally think that 40 miles is too far to consider areas as truly connected to Raleigh, it’s still an interesting comparison.
What was most interesting to me is just how many more people live in the Raleigh area compared to Nashville when using this methodology. In fact, the Raleigh centric area remains much more populated than Nashville at each size radii (25, 35, & 40 miles).
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Yeah I think 40 miles is too far personally to call areas ‘connected’ but some might feel differently. If my geography is correct, DC and Baltimore are about 40-ish miles apart and I consider those distinctly different areas. For reference I think Pittsboro to Raleigh is about 40 miles here, so maybe folks in Pittsboro feel more connected to Raleigh than someone in Baltimore to DC (and vice versa).
Agreed, either Raleigh overperforms or Nashville underperforms on this list. I was surprised to see Hartford, CT and Providence, RI higher than Raleigh on the list. I chalk that up to the more densely populated NE corridor than anything else.
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In the northeast, there are lots of overlapping “cities” using this methodology. The worst examples are the Boston/Worcester/Providence numbers. The circles overlap each other and there a lot of people in the suburbs/exurbs who are counted 3 times. There are also a lot of examples of overlapping circles where lots of burbs are counted twice. DC/Baltimore is one such example.
Pittsboro is probably only about 15 miles to Beaver Creek shopping center (and 540). There was a time when Greensboro was the main pull for much of Chatham County, but with Chapel Hill and Apex encroaching that’s changed quite a bit. Unlike Baltimore/DC, Pittsboro is becoming a bedroom community without an employment base of its own.