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Comment by throw4847285 | Hacker News Reader

When I went to Chile I was about to undertake a cross-country move across the US. Everybody I spoke to in Santiago couldn't imagine a country where you can drive a massive distance like that and move from one major metropolis to another. At the time, I thought they were just reflecting on the fact that Chile is a country where 40% of all people live in one metro area, so there isn't another huge metro area to move to.

Looking at those maps, I understand their incredulity. Because of the shape of Chile, you can drive a similar distance and basically cover the entire country, rural, urban, and suburban. It's both a large country and a small one at the same time.

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The Concepción metro area is 1 million people, Valparaíso/Viña as well. Chileans love to point out that there isn't much outside of Santiago but it's not really true.

There isn’t. Especially in the south. Floods, fires, and killer bears. It’s like The Purge, but every day. Don’t come.

> killer bears

I think this is where you gave it away. Nobody will believe this and we're all moving to south Chile now.

I would like to hear more about the killer bears, please

He is keeping the price of the land low for his next investment

Valparaíso and Viña are just next door from Santiago though.

While that might be true, Chile is a very centralized country, unfortunately.

I was talking to Santiaguinos, so I took it with a grain of salt.

is 1 million people a lot? I lived most of my life in metro areas of 15-30 million. when I finally ventured out and saw so many famous places at 1.5 million or less and how I could drive in and then back out of their downtowns in just a few blocks I was kind of shocked on how small most places are

There are only 26 areas in the world which are 15-30 million. They have about 550 million people, or about 7% of the world's population.

1 million is fairly large, especially in the context of Chile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities

That list really undercounts many metro areas.

DC’s “Metropolitan area in 2020 was 6,385,162” it’s CSA was 9,546,579 in 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_metropolitan_area

That list puts it at 5.2 million people.

The 6M is included in the 9. They're not separate counts.

That CSA also includes Baltimore so not a vary fair example. Absolutely not the same metro.

I was mostly bringing up the 5.2 vs 6.4 both under Metro area.

The CSA isn’t necessarily relevant, but a reasonable agreement exists that it’s really the same metro area. The beltways (495, 695) are less than 25 miles apart. Laurel, Maryland is 20 miles from both downtown DC and downtown Baltimore. Meanwhile the other cities from Richmond to Boston are 95-200 miles from each other.

I knew someone whose tech support job would regularly send them to both cities in the same day. Apparently many companies located between them so they could easily serve both.

You can’t just look at distance and judge. I knew guys who lived north of Baltimore but commuted every day to the Pentagon. That doesn’t make Baltimore and DC two parts of the same city.

Just like there are people who commute from New York to London, or vice-versa. NyLon is a thing, but that still doesn’t make them two parts of the same city.

Same city is irrelevant, same metro area based on how people behave is what matters.

People commuting from downtown Baltimore to DC have a faster commute than many living in well recognized DC suburbs. That’s very different than NyLon.

Distance is irrelevant. I lived there. The cultures of DC and Baltimore are fundamentally different. Related, yes. But not the same.

The culture of poor parts of DC is vastly different than the culture of places 2 streets away. Culture is ultra local.

Culture is fractal, and happens on many different levels. And there are many types of stratifications of culture. And those stratifications can happen in multiple dimensions at the same time.

But culture can also refer to a larger conglomeration of smaller cultures, or components of smaller cultures.

Just like a meal or dinner from one place can have many different components, and be differently prepared from a meal or dinner of the same overall type from some other place. There are components that may be shared between them, and there might be components that are different. But even if you start out with the exact same components in both places, the end result may be radically different, simply due to the different methods and the different people involved.

In the case of DC versus Baltimore, it’s the larger scale differences that I’m talking about.

> In the case of DC versus Baltimore, it’s the larger scale differences that I’m talking about.

Those differences aren’t larger in scale than Loudan or Fauquier county vs DC. Simply being different doesn’t on its own mean anything here.

I lived there. I traveled all over that area. The Northern Virginia counties are much closer to the culture in DC than the culture in Baltimore.

What parts of DC, Baltimore, and Loudan county did you live in?

Culture isn’t easy to find objective measurements but politically things are objectively similar between Baltimore and DC with extremely strong Democratic leanings. 2020 DC voted 5.40% Trump, 92.15% Biden vs Baltimore City 10.69% Trump, 87.28% Biden vs Fauquier County 57% Trump, 40% Biden.

DC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...

VA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...

MD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...

Poor parts of DC are much closer to poor parts of Baltimore than the rich areas of Loudan county etc.

Poor parts of every county or city are going to have more similarities to other poor parts of every other city or county than compared to the rich areas that may be nearby.

That is one aspect of the multi-dimensional fractal nature of culture that I mentioned. Poor/rich is just one dimension to be considered. So are political leanings.

However, when you consider all the other dimensions, you will find that DC and the surrounding suburbs have more similarities to each other than they do with the corresponding areas in and around Baltimore.

Making them up to be the same CSA is just the way that the federal government gets away with paying cheaper wages in the DC area, because they can now lump Baltimore in there, and obviously by that new federal standard, federal wages in the DC area are not out of line with the overall CSA.

It’s just a lie that the federal government is telling you. And that they told me, when I lived there.

They expanded the CSA to include Baltimore so as to reduce the average salary rate, and thus they didn’t have to pay for COLA wage increases.

From late 1989 to mid 1998, I lived in various parts of Northern Virginia and the Capitol region of Maryland, and made many trips to Baltimore. Totally not the same metro.

Having lived in Baltimore, it's juuust far enough from DC to not be a twin city.

Just out of curiosity, how far is far enough? As a thought experiment, would a shinkansen running every six minutes change this?

I think it's less about distance and more about culture. DC and Baltimore are vastly different in culture, recreational activities, industries, demographics, etc. People don't live downtown in one and work in the other. The commute would kill you. Average income in DC is nearly double what it is in Baltimore.

Like, imagine SF and Oakland, but with an extra 30 miles in between.

> DC and Baltimore are vastly different in culture, recreational activities, industries, demographics, etc. People don't live downtown in one and work in the other. The commute would kill you. Average income in DC is nearly double what it is in Baltimore.

Culture, recreational activities, demographics, etc. vary quite a bit in other "twin city" type situations as well. Dallas and Fort Worth are about as culturally different as you can get at that distance, and of course people don't live downtown in one and work in the other - people are making a very specific choice with very specific tradeoffs when it comes to living in a downtown area in general, and those don't make sense if you're not explicitly spending most of your time in that area. Income is about the only thing that doesn't hold true in the Texas and Minnesota examples listed elsewhere in the comments, and DC has some conditions fairly specific to it that cause that.

> SF and Oakland

I don't have a link but I remember reading an article/Blog post linked here on hn where a software developer was in San Francisco one evening, saw the cops arresting someone, went to say something, got arrested himself and they held him over a long weekend or something in terrible conditions, and the police officers said some terrible things like the person he arrested was overpaid and the officer had to live in Oakland or something.

I've never been to SF/Oakland but this is one of the first thing I think of when the place is mentioned. How is the employee to blame for structural/ societal issues. What kind of idiot dumps their frustration on just some passer by?

Instead of a shinkasen running every six minutes, we get a low-speed train that runs about once an hour, and only during working hours. If you work past 8 PM you're going to have to find another way home.

I don't really know what's far enough, but culturally they consider themselves entirely distinct. People from one almost never work in the other; the trains that do exist are for bringing people from the suburbs.

Even those suburbs are fairly distinct. There's a dividing line at Columbia, MD where people go both directions, and nearly everybody else affiliates themselves with one city or the other.

Another way to look at it: they have separate sports teams. They're not even rivals, because they play in different leagues. Within the city fans are pretty exclusive, and the other city's teams aren't of interest.

Maybe that would change if it were possible to live in one and work in the other, or if they commonly shared night-life or restaurants or leisure. Instead, the other city is a full-day trip, not a jaunt across town.

None of what’s in this comment or others reflects my experience at all. I work in DC and have had many colleagues who live in downtown Baltimore and Baltimore suburbs, even suburbs north of Baltimore. They have been Orioles fans. Some have driven, others take commuter rail. I live in a suburb that is closer to DC but the commuter pattern on the highway reflects traffic flow to the Baltimore area in the morning and away from it in the evening. My wife and I work in downtown DC and we live closer to DC than Baltimore, but we routinely attend cultural and recreational events in Baltimore and of course fly from the Baltimore airport. We had memberships in the National Aquarium (in Baltimore) and have taken our kids to the Maryland Zoo. They have never been to the National Zoo in DC.

Baltimore and DC are absolutely one metro, just like Dallas/Fort Worth and Minneapolis/Saint Paul. That two cities have distinct identities doesn’t mean they aren’t one metro.

Looking at that list there are probably 100s of "metro areas" with > 1m

Look at the UN 2019 population estimates and sort by it. The last 10 areas are

5.49m, 5.49m, 5.38m, 5.38, 5.30m, 5.21m, 5.16m, 5.09m, 5.05m, 5.02m

Given how curves like this usually go there's an extremely long tail to get to 1m

Concepcion has only ~200k people with <1m metro. Looking at a map of the city and with only 200k people it doesn't seem big

A fair point. This list has 468 above 1 million and I think that's the urban boundaries and not metro

I hadn't actually googled concepcion, 200,000 in the urban area is quite small. It would be interesting to somehow workout the percentile of population living in a larger/smaller place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_with_over_one_m...

In my book, 1M people is when a city starts to become a “proper” city. It’ll host major events, invest in public transit (beyond bus), have extensive infrastructure, have extremely thorough airport service, likely have many walkable neighborhoods, and generally feel like a city.

Under 1M and the city center tends to be very small with most people driving from the suburbs.

>Under 1M and the city center tends to be very small with most people driving from the suburbs.

That's a very US or modern Asian city view. In my corner of the world, the Rhine-Ruhr area and the Franco/German/Benelux region almost all cities are < 1 million but you'd be hard pressed to not call Ghent or Rotterdam[1] or Düsseldorf a proper city.

[1]https://t0.gstatic.com/licensed-image?q=tbn:ANd9GcR5dl_qfSco...

probably the median income of the area also goes into it, 1m with low median income might perform at about the same as 800,000 with high median income.

European cities - compared to U.S at least - also maybe have the factor of how long it has been a city to contribute to how much "a city" it seems.

Edinburgh, where I have lived/worked for 40 years and has a population of just over 500K has all of those and more: major arts festivals, good train and growing tram networks, good airport links, very walkable and certainly "feels" more like a city than a lot of much larger cities.

“This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again.”

the "City of Edinburgh" may be 500k people, but the metropolitan area is bigger - once you include the outlying towns which people commute from there's more like 800-900k people.

https://www.citypopulation.de/en/uk/agglo/S20000463A__edinbu...

The festivals also completely skew things. Edinburgh in February is a vastly different city than Edinburgh in August.

That's right - in February it's full of students ;-)

We're talking metro area, not city. If the city is 1M, it's metro area is likely 1.5 to 3 million. If the metro area is 1m then the city is probably 750k to 350k people.

The post above said "The Concepción metro area is 1 million people" which means the city itself is much smaller. In fact, Wikipedia says it's 200k people, 1m metro area

Just a quibble about the metro to city population ratio... I think it's usually a lot higher than 1.5 or 3 to 1. Portland where I live has a population of around 650k (city) and 2.6M (metro). So about 4:1. And it's one of the less spread out metro areas in the US. The LA metro has about 18.5M and the city itself about 4M. Chicago is also about 4:1. NYC is the exception at closer to 2.5:1.

Just having grown up in LA (the city), I think there's a cognitive bias in these places against recognizing just how freakin large they are when you live there. There are large corners of my home metro area I've never been to at all, whose people I would almost never interact with... and I say that as a former taxi driver! Of course, taxi driving in LA was always balkanized so you'd need separate licenses to pick up in this or that suburb... very Snow Crash-like even in the 90s.

...in America. In Eastern Europe, even 100k-200k city will have trams or trolleybuses, and will have most people living in condos near public transit, not in suburbs.

As someone who lives in a city with 1.5 million people... growing up I felt pretty underwhelmed by our downtown and you can indeed pass through it in a few blocks. The first time I went to Tokyo I felt like I was in a real city. But then again, it's one of the largest cities on earth, so of course it feels like a real city. Though cities like mine are far more common.

Jesus. What a post. 15-30 million? Where? There aren't that many on the planet.

Traveling around China, their sense of scale it pretty much 10x what America's is.

1 million is barely a city, around 5 million and you are a 2nd tier city, hit 8+ million and you are a "real city".

Meanwhile people in America are arguing that they are worried their "100k town is going to add 5000 people and become an urban hellscape!"

I visited a 8 million pop city. They had barely any foreign restaurants and my Chinese colleagues look down on me to have only visited a "small city".

China and India both have tons of places that meet that criteria.

I suspect Shenzhen for one

To all the downvotes, did you look at a map of Concepción?

It's small. It's 200k people. It's "metro area" (the 1m) is spread out.

"View of the World from Ruta 70"

City size is all definitional.

My first ever look at the states was out the window of a plane flying to NYC from the Bahamas at night. Straight up the east coast. Mind blowing. To my eyes it was one enormous city without any meaningful separation all the way. I was expecting to be surprised by the scale of the usa and yet it was way beyond what i could imagine.

Others won’t share that definition.

"BosWash" was the term E.F. Schumacher used for the east-coast conurbanation, in 1973. Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Baltimore-Washington. In Small is Beautiful: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful>

It's sprawled more since.

Apparently the term was coined by Herman Kahn in 1967: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BosWash>

I thought the same thing when flying from west coast to east coast, but in a different way.

In california a postage-stamp sized lot is a million dollars, yet flying over endless land all day in a plane at 600 mph, I couldn't help but think it might all be a scam.

We're not that far off from Judge Dredd's Mega-City One!

Boston Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.

beautiful image!

Concepcion, Valparaiso, Greater Temuco, La Serena/Coquimbo, Antofagasta are large urban zones.

You can learn more here https://elsemieni.net/megavision/

[Cerveza Cristal theme]

That's chile, Argentina is more similar to the US, however most people move from X => Buenos Aires.

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