Having grown up in London and two of those US cities, the population difference is visible.
The other things that hit me are the public transportation and the way US cities sprawl relative to European cities. IIRC, there's a city in Florida with like 3,000 people but more area than London.
Most UK citizens don't realise how big London is.
Some Mail reader in a village of 12 houses in Wiltshire petrified at the total crime in London despite it having a pop. of 10M compared with Wilts. 515k.
London, as a whole, is nowhere near the most dangerous place. Some dodgy part, mind.
Being someone who lives in said Wiltshire village, I always laugh when they put down The Mail to talk about "the London Bubble," from a village where 50% of them have one of three surnames
If we go by metropolitan areas Chicago is closer to 10 million. US cities have very arbitrary city limits. Some, like Boston are very small. It’s more accurate to include the greater metropolitan area. Just like Greater London.
hard to compare though because US city governments tend to be only a small part of the larger urban areas associated with those cities and commonly referred to as the cities. Is this comparing the city of Chicago of 2.5 million occupants or the metropolitan area which exceeds 9 million residents?
As mentioned elsewhere, some cities' official boundaries can make them seem much smaller than what people otherwise understand by the city of that name. I think there's a lot of the Bay Area that isn't strictly SF, but kind of is.
AFAIK (but I might be confusing stats I've seen/read) the number of homicides by knife is actually smaller in London than it is in those US cities added together. Let alone the dramatic difference in the gun-related death rate(s).
The 2nd amendment gun nuts like to point out UK's knife crime as a defence for lax control - they think the 'good guy with a gun' would help.
Truth is, it doesn't even help in the USA, and they have a higher knife crime problem.
As you point out, that's on top of the gun problem.
👍FWIW c. 2001 I was on the pre-MySpace, message-board 'social-media' arguing with USicans that would/could not differentiate between fact and opinion; wasting my time explaining how/why it was not true that the UK's murder-rate rose after we 'banned guns' after Dunblane.
If only. They've successfully exported that fucked-up nonsense to us, like it was flat-pack furniture for right-wing numpties in general (and scumbags like Farage and Johnson in particular) to assemble into Brexit.
Yeah, Putin has stirred the pot, but this shit started before his '3D chess' began.
This only works because of the way cities work in the US. Unlike the UK, you have a lot more smaller cities that make up a much larger city. The city proper of Dallas may be that size, but actual Dallas is Ft. Worth, Plano, etc and the 4th largest metro in the US.
Also worth remembering that the political/financial/technological/TV/movie/etc. capitals in the US are generally different cities. In England, it's all London.
I get the Fort Worth bit .. it's like Buda and Pest in Hungary. But Plano is miles away from Dallas - I visited a number of times and had to drive from their into the city proper.
That's because the US is car centered. While you thought Plano was a long drive, it is within a reasonable commute to Dallas for most people. We commute very different in the US (FYI I lived in the UK and Germany for almost a decade)
😄 everything is miles away from everything in most of the US
This is a huge factor in why we tend to be so car-dependent. It's not the only reason, but it's a big one. This is the third largest country in the world. We spread out accordingly.
I thought it was funny he said Plano...as it is technically closer to downtown Dallas than downtown Fort Worth (by like a mile). It probably seemed further because it was less urban.
Do these metro areas really feel like a single city? Or separate cities that grew quite close together.
Greater London of course absorbed surrounding towns, but it still feels like a single metropolis with a clear centre. The New York metropolitan area seems to include suburbs of Philadelphia.
They do feel like one city and if you got rid of all the city limit signs for the smaller cities you would likely wouldn't know you were technically in a different city. My city of Kansas City is a great example. Kansas City, Mo and Kansas City, KS are separated by an imaginary line.
Sort of...but not exactly. I know with Manchester, Greater Manchester is the metro, but also the county. It uses a borough system similar to New York. But most US cities are not set up like that. Each city in the metro is a separate government that sets it's own laws. So on a metro area you can...
have literally 100 different sets of laws on parking your car in the 100 different cities and towns that make up a large metropolitan area. The UK is more uniform and there is a body that manages the whole metro area. That is not the case in the US.
The city of San Francisco has ~800,000 residents, but if you consider the Bay Area as one single metro area, it has ~7.8 million people, whereas London proper has ~8.9 million. SF proper is more like if you combined a few of the central London boroughs and incorporated them as their own city
The Dallas metropolitan area includes, Arlington, Fort Worth, Denton, Plano, and dozens of smaller towns and population exceeding 8.3 million. Similar situation around Chicago and population of 9.2 million. That’s 17.5 million. London metro area is about 15 million.
Yes , I usually started from LAX, and it always seemed so small in comparison to Frankfurt or Heathrow,for example.
Once I saw Duchovny in the lounge and later read that his daughter was born that day.
Felt all fuzzy afterwards 😁
She must be a mom herself today.
Tbf, isn't this partly just because in at least some of those cases, a much smaller share of the metro area population lives within the municipal boundaries?
Almost nobody lives in the City of London, though, if you’re going by the municipal boundaries - it’s just the square mile which is almost exclusively financial district and early-closing pubs…
San Francisco isn't a "big" city, in the least. limited by its geography, it's only 7 miles by 7 miles, approximately. much of it is parks & green space. when i lived there, we hadn't even hit 700K pop. only when big tech moved in did the population soar.
That's mainly a function of England updating its metropolitan borough boundaries. Philadelphia Metro Area, Washington Metro Area are each about 70% of London proper, or 42% London Metro Area.
Seattle is not a very large city there are less than a million.
NY is comparable to London with 8.3M
LA has over 3M.
Left these out but listed Seattle????
Comments
Is Seattle meant to be a different colour to Chicago?
The other things that hit me are the public transportation and the way US cities sprawl relative to European cities. IIRC, there's a city in Florida with like 3,000 people but more area than London.
Some Mail reader in a village of 12 houses in Wiltshire petrified at the total crime in London despite it having a pop. of 10M compared with Wilts. 515k.
London, as a whole, is nowhere near the most dangerous place. Some dodgy part, mind.
Wow .. San Fran is that tiny?
Paris is tiny if you only look at it intra muros.
Truth is, it doesn't even help in the USA, and they have a higher knife crime problem.
As you point out, that's on top of the gun problem.
I met the proto-MAGAs. 😬
Yeah, Putin has stirred the pot, but this shit started before his '3D chess' began.
I doubt you could fit those US cities inside London geographically.
If we want to be correct, the comparison should only be with population of the City of London.
This is a huge factor in why we tend to be so car-dependent. It's not the only reason, but it's a big one. This is the third largest country in the world. We spread out accordingly.
Greater London of course absorbed surrounding towns, but it still feels like a single metropolis with a clear centre. The New York metropolitan area seems to include suburbs of Philadelphia.
Let's roll out the biggies: LA (502 mi^2), Phoenix (517 mi^2), and Houston (640 mi^2).
I was astonished how "small" the LA airport seemed, compared to the size of the city
Once I saw Duchovny in the lounge and later read that his daughter was born that day.
Felt all fuzzy afterwards 😁
She must be a mom herself today.
Washington DC population: 700,000
Washington DC metro area population: 6,300,000
I lived in Pittsburgh for awhile. Metro area is ~ 2.5mn but city limits are so tightly drawn it was barely 500,000 by that measure.
https://youtu.be/8RTWk9QIKS0?si=fnCCu1bEbRbn-Nsl
to now 15.6 million
NY is comparable to London with 8.3M
LA has over 3M.
Left these out but listed Seattle????