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)
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.