[Talk-us] Possible method for identifying major US cities

Nathan Edgars II neroute2 at gmail.com
Tue Oct 26 02:39:11 BST 2010


On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 6:43 PM, Nathan Edgars II <neroute2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> In effect this is a classification by population of the urbanized area
> rather than only within the city limits, with a
> micropolitan-metropolitan cutoff of 50,000 instead of our town-city
> cutoff of 100,000. Perhaps it would be best to use place=city for the
> principal cities of the Metropolitan Statistical Areas and place=town
> for the Micropolitan Statistical Areas, and then drop everything else
> down to village or hamlet (which it would be anyway by the population
> criteria). Or if there's a way to identify which of the principal
> cities are really major suburbs, place=suburb could be useful.

I've done it in Florida. Here's the algorithm I used:
principal city of a Metropolitan Statistical Area: city
principal city of a Micropolitan Statistical Area: town
other incorporated municipality with population over 10,000: suburb
(these are all inside statistical areas)
other incorporated municipality with population under 10,000: village,
hamlet, or (in the case of Islandia) locality (according to the
cutoffs on http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:place)
other unincorporated places: left alone for now

After panning around it looks pretty good, though the rendering rules
could be improved (zoom 10 labels islands but not places below town,
for example, and in general smaller places should appear at lower
zooms than they do).



More information about the Talk-us mailing list