Big McLargehuge
Fragile Traveler
Eh... I disagree with that Pittsburgh number. What are they defining as a "metropolitan area"?
I've never seen a metro population of Pittsburgh listed outside of the 2.3-2.6 million range in my lifetime, so it seems accurate to me.
Pittsburgh's city population is only so relatively tiny because it's one of the smallest 'big' cities by land area (58.34 sq. miles, to say nothing of topography). To compare cities randomly: Columbus covers ~3.7x as much land, San Jose ~3.1x, Tampa ~3x, Denver ~2.5x, Dallas ~6x, Raleigh ~2.5x, even Las Vegas is ~2.3x larger, and to bring the NFL's saddest joke into it: Jacksonville covers ~15x as much land as Pittsburgh. Despite growing up just a couple minutes from downtown, Pittsburgh's population didn't change when I moved out...the metro area lost me, but despite being a tunnel away from downtown I haven't had a Pittsburgh address since I was a baby and my parents moved one suburb over. I'd say counting the counties surrounding the city is a more than fair metric, and by adding up the counties surrounding Pittsburgh you get Pittsburgh's estimated metro area so I think it's safe to say that's the metric used. I'd argue that you could include a couple other places here with little argument from anyone, but none of them move the population needle all that much (~2.6m vs. ~2.3m).
County | Population (2018 est.) |
Allegheny | 1,218,452 |
Armstrong | 65,263 |
Beaver | 164,742 |
Butler | 187,888 |
Fayette | 130,441 |
Washington | 207,246 |
Westmoreland | 350,611 |
Total | 2,324,643 |
The 'every county around a city's county' as an easy qualifier for metro size falls apart once you start going west and counties start becoming the size of east coast states. Las Vegas's Clark County is roughly the size of New Jersey itself. I only have a stat from 2000 for this point, but apparently the Pittsburgh MSA covers the 55th largest area in the country, putting it 12th of 21 American NHL markets (including Seattle). Surprisingly St. Louis is 2nd on the list by that metric. Buffalo is dead last by a large margin, thanks to its location on a lake next to an international border and two state borders, with Hartford being the only easily recognizable city near it. Unsurprisingly the Coyotes nearly lap the league in this one metric.
Yes, I am procrastinating. Why do you ask?
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