Here’s a neat site that shows the subway systems of the world, all at the same scale. Now, the definition of “subway” is pretty loose here, and you have commuter systems like BART and MARTA intermingling with real Metros like London’s and NYCs. Nevertheless, it’s pretty neat. Neat enough that I actually took the time to superimpose BART and the NYC subway on top of Seattle, to get a sense of how massive those systems are:
If the scale is correct, it is a sobering object lesson in what a small town Seattle still is. The NYC Subway carries over 5 million passengers a day, almost twice the entire population of Washington state- and that doesn’t include ridership on the PATH, LIRR, Amtrak, Staten Island ferries, or the buses.
Manhattan Island, envisioned on the map above as roughly the dense mass of lines from just south of Kenmore to the packed nub in Elliot Bay, has a population of 1.6 million people. Add in the contiguous boroughs and just at a guess we’re talking about a population greater than Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana combined- and on the map above, the subway lines run out almost to the outer borders of the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn.
Manhattan, at 70,000 people per square mile, is about ten times as dense as Seattle, with about 7,000 people per square mile. Obviously, population density only hints at the difference in density of built environment or the number of people who come to work in Manhattan each day and leave in the evening.
In any case, it seems obvious Seattle won’t be building a NYC-style subway any time in the near future.
I choose option B.
From The Office of Management and Budget’s statistical area definitions for Metropolitian areas (estimates series are defined as of January 1, 2007)
New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA 18,815,988
State poplulations according to the 2008 estimates of the United States Census Bureau.
Washington 6,549,224
Oregon 3,790,060
Idaho 1,523,816
Montana 967,440
========= 12,830,540
(keep going)
Nevada 2,600,167
Utah 2,736,424
North Dakota 641,481
========= 18,808,612
Gawd, no wonder it feels so crowded around here. You nod off for just a few minutes and another three million people move here.
Makes you wonder what would happen if we didn’t solve global warming and California got really hot….
Seattle metro area is 15th largest in the nation:
Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA 3,309,347
Although they call it Sea-Tac-Bel I believe that also includes the other surrounding suburbs.
Portland comes in at number 23:
Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, OR-WA 2,175,113
No info for Canada but the closest large metro areas in the US would be San Francisco 678 miles away at number 12
San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA 4,203,898
Sacramento 625 miles away is number 26
Sacramento–Arden-Arcade–Roseville, CA 2,091,120
And Salt Lake City 700 miles away is number 48
Salt Lake City, UT 1,099,973
Seattle was growing faster both in percentage and actual numbers of people (2006 vs 2007) but unless there is a dramatic shift it would be more than century before populations would equal out. However, by 2030 the Seattle Metro area will likely have as many people as San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont does today.
It’s quite the eye opener to think that the daily ridership on the NYC subway is equal to the entire population of the Seattle and Portland metro areas combined (more than all of SF and Oakland). It points out that if one is looking at national averages you really should remove NYC from the equation for a fair comparison to other metro areas. NYC is on a whole different planet when it comes to transit usage and large enough that they significantly skew the averages.
Actually the OMB 2008 (estimated) population figure for the San Francisco Combined Statistical Area, which includes San Francisco, Oakland, and Fremont, the South Bay (San Jose and Silicon Valley areas) and the North Bay (Marin, Napa and Sonoma counties) is 7,092,596.
I don’t know why they break the Bay Area up like they do, it would be like not including eastern King County as part of the Seattle MSA.
I think it’s probably that San Jose and the rest of Silicon Valley are in many ways separate from San Francisco. Included in the San Francisco Metropolitan area, (not the CSA) are all the adjoining counties.
Actually, having lived there at one time, San Jose is not separate at all. Development is solid all around the bay with no breaks and nothing to differentiate the two areas. You could drive from San Francisco down the peninsula to San Jose then back up the east bay to Richmond and except for the boundary signs there is nothing separating them. Hundreds of thousands of people cross between the two every day.
What I mean is that San Jose has enough of its own jobs that it is an anchor for that area.
Steve,
OMB has another Combined Statistical Area for western Washington that includes Olympia. That scale bumps Seattle up from 15th to 12th. I don’t think they combine across international boarders but if they did I think it would still put us behind the Bay Area when you look at density. The stats I had were 2006 and 2007 so there’s some additional growth there too, about 1-1.5% per year.
The Vancouver area’s population is 2,116,581 as of 2006.
Also, there is another measure of the wider area for US metropolitan areas. These are combined statistical areas. The New York-Newark-Bridgeport, NY-NJ-CT-PA CSA has 21,961,994 as of 2007, and the Seattle-Tacoma-Olympia, WA CSA has 4,038,741. In this measure, our area comes in 12th.
Finally, I checked the NYC subway map and you’re about 15% less than it should be. Still, it is interesting to see how the city of New York is more than half the size of urbanized King County. And keep in mind that there are also three enormous commuter rail systems. But I would certainly love to see a network of that density in Seattle city limits as is in Manhattan.
Well, my initial amazement was seeing that, on the map above, Manhattan from the Battery to Grand Central would fit between Elliot Bay and the U of W. To put it another way, in a land area about the size of the City of Seattle (about 560,000 pop) NYC would have a population of about 5,000,000.
So, my thinking about a “network of that density in Seattle” totally breaks down. Bear in mind, the subway lines on that map carry 8-10 car heavy commuter trains that run, standing-room-only, every five minutes during rush hour. So I see a network of that density in Seattle about as likely as my cat having a kitten with wings that could fly.
It’s also pretty amazing, in several dimensions, that the journey to Coney Island is about as far as going to Renton. All very mind-boggling.
No. Seattle has 83 sq mi of land, and NYC has a density of 27,000/sq mi, so that would be 2.2m. Still a lot, but not nearly as much as you said.