"But compared with the majority of U.S. cities, Los Angeles is not a transit wasteland. The region is second in the nation in transit patronage, behind only New York. Even on a market share basis (passenger transit miles traveled as a share of all miles traveled), Los Angeles’s ridership rate is relatively high: 11th among the 50 largest urban areas."
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/los-angeles...
The myths appear to arise from a multitude of factors, such as confusing downtown density with overall density, and viewing the city through the eyes of Hollywood. Also, once a city acquires a reputation (such as NYC and crime), it takes forever to lose it.
It seems like there's a lot of room for fudge factors in the numbers though. How are they defining metro areas? By many definitions, the NYC metro area extends out to the tip of Long Island, which is nearly all farmland, forest, and beach. The forks of Long Island have a combined population of 125,000 (1/10th of Manhattan) on land area of 564 sq mi (almost 20 times bigger than Manhattan).
Similarly, the Boston metro area is often considered to extend out to Worcester and southern New Hampshire, which includes towns like Dunstable (3000 people on land area that's about the size of downtown Boston). But there's a very big difference between a metro area like Boston where most of the people live within a dense urban core and then it drops off to farmland and open space quickly, vs. one like LA where it's medium-density suburbs all the way through.
Agreed. If we were to look at the cities' population density the figures are stark.
Los Angeles
pop: 3,849,378
dens: 8,205
New York
pop: 8,274,527
dens: 27,147
Vancouver
pop: 578,041
dens: 13,817.6
London
pop: 7,556,900
dens: 12,331
The kicker is that these figures obscure the fact that the core of LA just 3 million. In other words, only 1/4 of the people live in the core, and the core is still more spread out than these other cities.
By contrast, half of the people in the NY Metro live in NYC proper. In London, greater than half of the people live in it London proper.
LA's profile is most similar to Vancouver's, which is a city with fewer people in its greater metro area than LA has in its core.
When looking at Long Island as part of the NYC metro area, usually Suffolk gets split in half. At least from my perspective as someone who grew up on LI. Though that probably doesn't happen when looking at census data.
(If you're familiar with Long Island, the metro area in Suffolk would be Suffolk - anything south of the Sunrise Highway up until Westhampton (going up north through Riverhead), and anything east of that boundary)
"According to the Federal Highway Administration, of the 36 largest metro areas, Los Angeles ranks dead last in terms of freeway lane miles per resident." http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/los-angeles...
"But while the situation is far from ideal, the numbers from the California Air Resources Board make it clear that Los Angeles has come a remarkably long way toward cleaning up the air." http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/los-angeles...
"As of the 2000 census, the Los Angeles region’s urbanized area had the highest population density in the nation. Yes, that was the word “highest,” not a smudge on your monitor." http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/los-angeles...
"But compared with the majority of U.S. cities, Los Angeles is not a transit wasteland. The region is second in the nation in transit patronage, behind only New York. Even on a market share basis (passenger transit miles traveled as a share of all miles traveled), Los Angeles’s ridership rate is relatively high: 11th among the 50 largest urban areas." http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/los-angeles...
The myths appear to arise from a multitude of factors, such as confusing downtown density with overall density, and viewing the city through the eyes of Hollywood. Also, once a city acquires a reputation (such as NYC and crime), it takes forever to lose it.