Toronto vs. LA Thread

[rdaner]

Hear me out. With the release yesterday of updated population stats it is now clear to even the most out of date booster that the Toronto Region has passed Chicagoland in population. This is not a comment on Chicago!!!

The next region is LA which has 12.5m and though many will scoff at the notion of Toronto passing it I now wonder. Firstly is the continued decline in population on a regional level that has been occuring. Second is the immense challenges that seem to be accumulating with no evidence that the wide-ranging reform needed to address them is forthcoming.

Again this is about population and perhaps density and not anything else! And of course behind this, for me, is whether a comparison of NA metros is relevant in 2025 for as many have proved Canadian cities now resembles the UK or Scandinavia more than the US.

 

[Northern Light]

Hear me out. With the release yesterday of updated population stats it is now clear to even the most out of date booster that the Toronto Region has passed Chicagoland in population. This is not a comment on Chicago!!!

The next region is LA which has 12.5m and though many will scoff at the notion of Toronto passing it I now wonder. Firstly is the continued decline in population on a regional level that has been occuring. Second is the immense challenges that seem to be accumulating with no evidence that the wide-ranging reform needed to address them is forthcoming.

Again this is about population and perhaps density and not anything else! And of course behind this, for me, is whether a comparison of NA metros is relevant in 2025 for as many have proved Canadian cities now resembles the UK or Scandinavia more than the US.

I think the first point to make is that comparing populations with a clear lens of 'bigger is better' is wrong.

Most of the top ranking cities for quality of life are not among the 10 largest in the world or even the 10 largest in the developed world.

Vienna, Geneva, Zurich, Aukland, Amsterdam etc. are top tier cities by any measure, but also much smaller than Toronto is today.

****

That said, if you want to compare population for the sake of doing so.........

The Los Angeles Metro Area population is 12.8M that's ~12,500km2

Toronto's CMA is ~5,900km2 with a population of 7M

The GTHA is 8244km2 with a population of ~8.2M

The core Golden Horseshoe is: ~10,100km2 with a population of maybe 9M (I'd have to add up all the latest CSA data)

The Greater Golden Horseshoe is ~31,000km2 with a population of ~11M

But Greater Los Angeles is ~88,000km2 with a population of 18.5M

Very hard to do an Apples to Apples comparison.


LA Metro to Core Golden Horseshoe is probably the closest fit In that comparison LA has about ~2M more people.

I rather hope we don't catch them for a long time.

 

[lenaitch]

In comparison, Toronto is less flammable?

 

[Rad]

It is exceedingly difficult to compare Los Angeles, as a built-up geographical entity, to another city. LA is relatively unique. It isn’t really one place. It certainly has no centre. Instead, it is a patchwork of different urban, suburban, and semi-rural communities, all connected through a spiderweb pattern of freeways. You get everything from skater punks on the beach to cowboys on horses in the hills. LA sprawls in every direction, such that it creates the impression that it is endless.

If you’re going to do this population-to-area exercise anyway, it’s important to recognize the various municipal, county and political boundaries in and around Los Angeles extend over mountains, protected parkland, beaches, uninhabited islands, and desert. Without factoring that into account, you might lose your sense of how intensely dense the actually populated areas are (while overinflating the surface area covered).

There are problems with this conceptualization, but arguably LA consists of the entirety of Los Angeles County and Orange County combined. (Residents of the latter might chortle at the thought of being Angelenos but the built up areas of both counties are nevertheless contiguous.) That makes for a "city" of roughly 13 million people. Greater LA would be this, plus Ventura, San Bernardino and Riverside counties. That totals out to over 18 million souls.

 

[rdaner]

^Great replies! I hope that I made it clear that this is a theoretical exercise but I think that it is worth it for a few reasons. The first is to highlight how UA measures need to be more widely used as any other measures bring too much confusion and lead to misunderstanding by a huge % of the general public. The second is to convey to Canadians that we have something very rare on our hands that deserves clear thinking on the search for solutions that increasingly aren’t to be found in NA. Finally I like to think that many of the harder, pragmatic policy decisions that have been made here have produced very different results that are now a great advantage.