Anyone following the BeyondDC twitter feed over the weekend may have noticed the tweet saying “MD would be a cooler state if it had a mid-size city somewhere. like if frederick or annapolis were about 5 times bigger.” What I meant by “mid-size city” was something less than a metropolis like Washington or Baltimore, but more than a satellite city like Hagerstown; something big enough to have a few skyscrapers downtown, but not to have a major league sports franchise, for example. The thought came into my head while visiting Winston-Salem, NC, which is exactly the sort of mid-size second city that Maryland lacks.

When I got home I decided to look up some population numbers to compare just how big some of the cities in the region actually are. Municipal city boundaries are too arbitrary for my purposes though; despite where the political boundaries are drawn, Baltimore is NOT a bigger place than Washington. Instead, to get real apples-to-apples comparisons, I decided to look at urbanized areas, metropolitan areas and combined statistical areas. I broadened my search to include not just Maryland, but all the population centers of the area that in my mind encompass DC’s primary sphere of influence – Maryland, Virginia except the extreme southwest portion, Delaware, West Virginia’s Martinsburg panhandle, and south-central Pennsylvania.

This is what I found:

Urbanized Areas
(w/ a population above 100, 000 as of 2000)

1. Washington, DC – 3, 933, 920
2. Baltimore, MD – 2, 076, 354
3. Norfolk/VA Beach, VA – 1, 394, 439
4. Richmond, VA – 818, 836
5. Harrisburg, PA – 362, 782 (quite a gap)
6. Lancaster, PA – 323, 554
7. Roanoke, VA – 197, 442
8. York, PA – 192, 903
9. Aberdeen, MD – 174, 598
10. Hagerstown, MD – 120, 326
11. Frederick, MD – 119, 144

Metropolitan Areas
(w/ a population above 200, 000 as of 2007)

1. Washington, DC – 5, 306, 565
2. Baltimore, MD – 2, 668, 056
3. Norfolk/VA Beach, VA – 1, 658, 754
4. Richmond, VA – 1, 212, 977
5. Harrisburg, PA – 528, 892 (quite a gap, again)
6. Wilmington/Newark, DE – 500, 265*
7. Lancaster, PA – 498, 465
8. York, PA – 421, 049
9. Roanoke, VA – 296, 532
10. Hagerstown/Martinsburg, MD/WV – 261, 198
11. Lynchburg, VA – 243, 580

Combined Statistical Areas
(all pertinent groupings as of 2007)

1. Washington/Baltimore – 8, 241, 912
2. Norfolk/VA Beach – 1, 658, 754^
3. Richmond – 1, 212, 977^
4. Harrisburg/York/Lancaster – 1, 021, 730^

* Wilmington/Newark are actually part of the Philadelphia metropolitan area; for the purposes of this list I broke them out using the population of New Castle County.
^ Washington/Baltimore is the only official CSA on the list. Norfolk and Richmond CSAs are the same as their MSAs. Harrisburg/York/Lancaster does not meet the federal criteria to be combined, but for the purposes of this list I wanted to know what the combined number would look like.

Comparatively, the city that triggered this line of thought, Winston-Salem, has an urbanized area of 299, 290, a metropolitan area of 463, 159, and a combined statistical area (with Greensboro and High Point) of 1, 535, 926 – fairly comparable to Harrisburg.

Is Maryland really “less cool” because it doesn’t have a Harrisburg? Not really. Nor is anybody’s life less full because the Chesapeake region doesn’t have a city filling that Richmond-Harrisburg gap (Albuquerque, Omaha and Albany would all about split the difference, in case anybody wonders). These are just the sort of thoughts that go through my geek brain.