[Talk-us] Correct source for population=* tags on US metropolitan cities

[Ian Dees]

We should put the population of the city represented by the node on the
node, not the urbanized area that surrounds the node.

Your example of Minneapolis is a good one: the urban area population
includes many other cities around Minneapolis (like St. Paul). What
population would we put on St. Paul?

On Sat, Jan 9, 2021 at 4:50 PM Joseph Eisenberg <joseph.eisenberg at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Proposal:
> Use the census data on Urbanized Areas to set the "population=" value for
> "place=city" nodes, rather than using the whole metro population or just
> the population of the central municipality.
>
> Rationale:
> The tag "population=*" is helpful as a way to distinguish small place=city
> features (which might have less than 50,000 people in rural States) from
> huge cities. Many database users depend on this information for rendering
> decisions at low zoom levels (large scales) and as a general estimation of
> the "importance" of a place.
>
> However, currently most population figures are taken from the population
> in the municipal boundaries, since this is often what is on local signs and
> easily available from the census. While this is fine for towns and small
> cities which are contained in one municipality, it often misses
> unincorporated urban areas next to the city limits, and for large cities it
> badly underestimates the population of the area which is considered part of
> the "place".
>
> For example, many people in West Hollywood or East Los Angeles would
> consider that they live in the larger place "Los Angeles", even though they
> live in a different municipality or an unincorporated area. Someone who
> lives in Vancouver, Washington will often tell people they live "In
> Portland" when talking to someone from outside of the region, since it
> functions as a suburb of the Portland, Oregon metro area.
>
> So I propose that we should use an estimate of the urban population for
> the population=* tag when tagging metropolitan places. Usually this will
> lead to a larger population number, except in rare cases like Anchorage.
>
> In particular, I would like to use the US Census "urbanized area" figures,
> since these are much more sensible than the numbers from metropolitan areas
> based on county boundaries which can include distant towns and rural areas.
>
> This would mean that the place=city node for Portland, Oregon would have
> population=2072553 (representing the whole urbanized area) rather than just
> 654000 from the city limits.
> https://censusreporter.org/profiles/40000US71317-portland-or-wa-urbanized-area/
>
> Minneapolis, MN would have population=2885614 instead of only 429k
> https://censusreporter.org/profiles/40000US57628-minneapolis-st-paul-mn-wi-urbanized-area/
>
>
> But Anchorage would decrease slightly from 288k to 249K
> https://censusreporter.org/profiles/40000US02305-anchorage-ak-urbanized-area/
>
> Usually the difference would not change the relative rank of cities very
> much, but it would be good to have the population figure map the
> OpenStreetMap "place" concept, rather than the city limit boundaries.
>
> Eventually this could improve maps of the USA and help them better match
> those in other countries, where city limits tend to be much larger than in
> the case of many US cities, which often have many separate municipalities
> for suburbs.
>
> Of course it will still be appropriate to add the precise population=* to
> the boundary=administrative feature which represents the municipality, and
> database users could choose to emphasize those features instead.
>
> -- Joseph Eisenberg
>
> PS: the 2010 population figures of US Urbanized Areas are on wikipedia,
> and this year we will get updated 2020 figures, so it would be a good time
> to make this change. The biggest difference will be for Miami, Florida,
> where the central municipality is only 7% of the population of the whole
> urbanized area:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_areas
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