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    [OC] US Cities by Population
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    [OC] US Cities by Population

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    28 Comments

    1. TA-MajestyPalm on

      Graphic by me, created in excel. Source dataset here: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2020s-total-metro-and-micro-statistical-areas.html

      I thought it would be interesting to compare metro area populations of US cities, and try and group them into “Tiers” (large, medium, small etc). People often talk about living in a “small” or “large” city.

      For each population tier I simply divided the population threshold by 2, starting from 12 million. Obviously the cutoff points are subjective. The bars are scaled to population.

    2. off_by_two on

      I think it’s funny that Providence, RI has over 500k more people than the state of Rhode Island. The ‘metro area’ calulation might be a little over tuned lol

    4. platinum92 on

      lmao so we’re just redefining “small” and “medium” cities now? Small is generally anything over 5-10k (depending on source) and over 100k is usually medium

      Maybe using “metros” instead of cities would work better.

    5. sics2014 on

      Interesting. My city has about 160k and I always said I live in a small city.

      Apparently the metro area is about 450k and still doesn’t make the list.

    7. DWS223 on

      Orlando, Lakeland, and Tampa all showing up here is fascinating. Increasingly this is just a single huge urban area stretching from coast-to-coast in central
      Florida.

    11. ossetepolv on

      It continues to blow my mind that anyone uses MSAs for anything other than mocking the federal government’s statisticians.

    12. nomadality on

      Virginia Beach is about 450k. The Hampton Roads metro area has the 1.8 million that is mentioned.

    13. Late_Huckleberry850 on

      This is a much better metric for the ‘city’ feel than raw city population. Very cool!

    14. studio_sally on

      Love this graphic.

      I would say that some ‘Large’ cities like Boston and SF and Seattle, feel more like ‘Very Large’ cities. Tampa probably feels more like a ‘Medium’ city as well.

      A lot of people are pointing out the weirdness of things like SF and San Jose being separate metro areas (or LA and Riverside), but the Census does have Combined Statistical Areas (CSAs) for those ‘larger’ definitions. The issue with using CSAs instead is they are *extremely* broad in some cases and would just piss people off even more – things like NYC including Trenton, Boston including Providence, Portland including Salem, etc. There is no happy medium unfortunately, at least one thats officially defined and measured.

    17. PuzzledPurpleUnicorn on

      As someone who lives in southern California, riverside is not that big. Are they including all of riverside and orange counties or something like that?

    19. Comfortable-Reason-7 on

      LA feels like a fake big city – you have to drive everywhere. Chicago and NYC are the only true “big cities” in my opinion.

    21. Mr_Scamps on

      Interesting, Honolulu “feels” like it has a higher population due to the geography and how crammed in everyone is. Tons of giant condo tower blocks and houses stacked up right next to each other. Also the H1 has way more lanes than many larger cities I’ve been in.

    24. DocBeech on

      The Data is wrong. “Dallas” is 1.3 million, but DFW (Dallas – Fort Worth) is 8.3 million. So they have counted a metroplex/twin city as just “Dallas”.

    27. turb0_encapsulator on

      they separated Riverside from Los Angeles and San Francisco from San Jose. Those areas are. bigger if you combine them.

    28. semideclared on

      if you want to update it I’d recommend doing tiers based on density

      And of course the suburbs shouldnt count