Chapter 4

Today we are talking about Chapter 4 of the book  "Regional Landscapes of the United States and Canada" by Stephen Birdsall. 

Chapter 4 talks about Northeastern United States. In the book, they call it the Megalopolis. Included are parts of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, parts of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Washington D.C., some of Virginia and finally, some of Pennsylvania. But although we do talk about Pennsylvania in this chapter, it does not include Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is in Western PN and we are talking about eastern PN, which includes the state's capital, Harrisburg and the historical city of Philadelphia.

The book states, "Ten of the country's 46 Metropolitan areas exceeding 1 million people in 2000 were located in the Megalopolis." (p. 66)

The US Census Bureau has a link to the Annual Estimates of the Population of Metropolitan areas from April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2011. If you click a link, go to "Annual Estimates of the Population of Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas: April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2011" and click XLS to access the information I'm about to tell you. But if you click XLS, the information will load in Excel.

In the Excel document, the population estimates for 2011 are 2,359,746 people.

But I know what you're thinking, Maddy, the book was talking about the year 2000. Why are you giving me information for 2011. Well, I think it's important to have up to date information. Isn't that the point of a blog?

Let's back-up and look at data from 12 years ago, just like data our textbook cited. (Remember the book came out in 2009 -- before the 2010-11 census data came out.) For this, we are going to this link (also on the US Census site.) From there, click Table three (Metropolitan Areas Ranked by Population: 2000)'s excel document. The nice thing about this document is it has the most populated areas in order. Pittsburgh is 22nd biggest metropolitan place in the US (2,358,695 people). Some of the cities in the Megalopolis that beat Pittsburgh were NYC (1st) and Philadelphia (6th). Pittsburgh did beat Hartford, CT (came in at 42).

Not that much of a difference in 11 years, is it?

What's the point of this post? How do Pittsburgh relate to the Megalopolis? Well, we are comparing Pittsburgh's Metropolitan area to the Megalopolis. As you can see, Pittsburgh's metropolitan area is similar to Megalopolis' area