A Different Map of the US - Economic Megaregions

"DrJohannVegas" (drjohannvegas)
12/01/2016 at 14:04 • Filed to: None

We’ve seen lots of maps of the US recently, mostly reflecting political divides. Some are accurate, others...less so. But in the same way that maps can inform, they can also blind us to features of our society.

Most maps of the US focus on political boundaries - borders defined by legal negotiations which define the limits of subnational authority. But people’s lives don’t always fit neatly within those boundaries. Maybe you cross a city, or county, or state border to get to work. Maybe you cross those borders for school, or to worship. Maybe you just like to cross borders for fun.

The map above is what happens when a computer decides how to draw borders and ignores political boundaries. Those lines (vectors) are commuter flows, one way of measuring the economic geography of the United States. Rather than think of space as what is contained by legal boundaries, we can think of the space as divided into economic enclaves. The researchers who created these maps simply asked the computer to look at a large dataset of economic connections and draw a new set of borders around economic regions.

When the computer calculates all the commuting data, it fits a new set of boundaries based on the “connectedness” of census areas. This is what you get:

I like the top map more (because it’s colorful and shows connections), but the bottom tells a really powerful economic geography story, and that’s pretty neat, too.

Here’s the Atlas Obscura article on the paper:

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And here’s the paper itself on PLOSOne:

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(Oh, and in case this wasn’t a clear heads-up: I’m back, and I’ll be back to regularly posting nerdy shit on Oppo again soon.)

(Oh, Pt 2: If you want to complain that this isn’t car-related, I ask you to consider how most people in the US commute to work over moderate-to-long distances.)

(Edit: Bumped for the work crowd.)

DISCUSSION (22)

DynamicWeight > DrJohannVegas
11/30/2016 at 19:35

I agree with the Bay Area section of the map. Much more realistic.

Berang > DrJohannVegas
11/30/2016 at 19:36

Please present the info in the form of a venn diagram.

DrJohannVegas > Berang
11/30/2016 at 19:37

Kinja'd!!!

Berang > DrJohannVegas
11/30/2016 at 19:39

Accurate diagram of America. 100%

Phatboyphil > DrJohannVegas
11/30/2016 at 19:40

Kind of depressing that Montanna and other states didn’t get to stay in the US :(

DrJohannVegas > Phatboyphil
11/30/2016 at 19:43

Apologies for going a bit techy/nerdy, but:

I suspect that the tricky thing with those areas is that any fitting threshold which would have made cohesive regions there would have caused havoc in the East and on the West Coast.

Also, they aren’t “outside” the US, they just aren’t part of an economic superregion. They’re free and unincorporated!

Phatboyphil > DrJohannVegas
11/30/2016 at 20:08

That makes sense. On the plus side it could be a real wild west! But with mad max vehicles instead of horses!

DrJohannVegas > Phatboyphil
11/30/2016 at 20:14

It is really hard to appreciate the scale of the West (and the US in general) until you traverse it on the ground. One of my most fun grad school memories was cannonballing back from a conference in Seattle to Michigan with a colleague. We had to get back to teach on the first day of classes, so we had ~40 hours to do a ~35 hour drive. Drove in shifts, the other sleeping on and off. We were already fatigued and tired from... conference stuff. (yea, that’s it.)

Anyhow: Driving across parts of northern Wyoming in pitch darkness, with nothing but headlights and the flares of refineries to break the interminable inky abyss, one begins to see the world in a different light. The sleep deprivation didn’t help. Mad Max is right.

Postscript: First day’s lecture was probably one of the best I’ve ever given.

Honeybunchesofgoats > DrJohannVegas
11/30/2016 at 20:25

As someone who used to commute from New Jersey to New York and now commutes from New Jersey to Pennsylvania, that really resonates with me.

I have no idea what’s going on with New Orleans though. That’s a crazy amount of commuting.

Stephenson Valve Gear > DrJohannVegas
11/30/2016 at 20:57

HOKEY SMOKES BULLWINKLE! Apparently, I now live in NewOkieLand.

Now draw me a vector to depression...

Stephenson Valve Gear > DrJohannVegas
11/30/2016 at 21:07

I love taking road trips across the US. We don’t dawdle too much; instead we tend to roll along at an exuberant rate of speed. Even so, it really give one a feel for the size and diverse geography of the United States. This spring we did a coast-to-coast run across the southern US that was a ball. I hope to do another transcontinental drive next year sometime...

Eric @ opposite-lock.com > Phatboyphil
11/30/2016 at 22:34

I used to work in that region. There is very little out there and nothing is contiguous enough to be an economic region there. It was so sparse that when a single Walmart opened 75 miles from where I lived, it obliterated the local economy. It was so sparse that people waved when they saw other cars on the roads (about every 5-15 minutes, on average).

It was a great place. My favorite part of the country aside from where I live now (I wish they fought for 54'40", because I’d love to live in what is now Canada), since it would be part of that non-metro area.

shop-teacher > DrJohannVegas
12/01/2016 at 00:26

Interesting stuff. I couldn’t help but laugh at the “state” of Chicago. People from down-state Illinois are always bitching about how they wish Chicagoland would break off into it’s own state.