Metro Tim

A project 34 years in the making shall now be deemed complete to my satisfaction!

Many years ago, when looking at standard reference books for high school assignments, I thought of what it would be like if official definitions of metropolitan areas covered every county in the 50 states and D.C. - not just those closest to the central cities.

Perhaps the biggest driver of this interest was radio, since rating services like Arbitron used government definitions as a basis for their own metropolitan areas, with some modifications. From time to time, I came up with some rather rough definitions of my own to cover every county, but none of them seemed very accurate.

Now I think we can finally settle on a real set of definitions. I used FreeBASIC to process databases of county-to-county commuting data and other factors to create something consistent and believable. This is not specifically for radio but rather more for general purposes. However, this is not a list I intend to keep modifying, so I use data from the 2000 census and the resulting roster of official metropolitan areas as the reference point. (This is despite the fact that I was skipped by that census.) My new list is retconned to have applied in the 1970s and shall be deemed to apply today.

So read it and peep...

http://bunkerblast.info/newmetros.html