I think it might be clearer to break up the Bay Area into SF, East Bay, North Bay and South Bay. These locations all take about an hour to travel between, which makes them comparable to London, Oxford and Cambridge (even Bristol). Including such a large area as a single category makes it much easier to rank top. Wikipedia reports that London is about 600 square miles, while the nine-county Bay Area is 7000. I appreciate that what counts as a city is not clear, but I’d definitely say the Bay Area is more than one city. (Alternatively, we could group ‘Loxbridge’ as one category.)
Seems plausible that it’d be worth making this change although it does seem complicated.
A lot of people commute from the East Bay into SF. It’s not clear to me whether somebody who lives in Oakland/Berkeley but works in SF should be included as ‘SF’ or ‘East Bay.’ Am I right that this is a lot less common in Loxbridge? If so, that makes the communities feel somewhat more distinct.
I don’t know England well enough to figure out where each city’s suburbs end but when I made a vague attempt to draw an area around Loxbridge, it seemed to be about 5,000 square miles. That’s actually pretty close to the area of the Bay Area, which is 3,000 square miles if you just include the four counties where (I think) the overwhelming majority of EAs live: Alameda, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and San Francisco. (You don’t have to travel through the other five counties to travel between these ones).
Minor: I’d say the travel times in ‘Loxbridge’ are somewhat longer than an hour.
Time from (e.g.) Oxford train station to London train station is an hour, but adding on the travel time from ‘somewhere in Oxford/London to the train station’ would push this up to ~2 hours. Oxford to Cambridge takes 3-4 hours by public transport.
The general topic looks tricky. I’d guess if you did a kernel density map over the bay, you’d get a (reasonably) even gradient over the 3k square miles. If you did the same over ‘Loxbridge’ you’d get very strong foci over the areas that correspond to London/Oxford/Cambridge. I’d also guess you’d get reasonable traffic between subareas in the bay area, but in Loxbridge you’d have some Oxford/London and Cambridge/London (a lot of professionals make this sort of commute daily) but very little Oxford/Cambridge traffic.
What criteria one uses to chunk large connurbations into natural language looks necessarily imprecise. I’d guess if you had the ground truth and ran typical clustering algos on it, you’d probably get a ‘bay area’ cluster though. What might be more satisfying is establishing whether the bay acts like a single community: if instead there is a distinguishable (e.g.) East Bay and South Bay community, where people in one or the other group tend to go to (e.g.) events in one or the other and visit the other occasionally (akin to how an Oxford-EA like me may mostly attend Oxford events but occasionally visit London ones), this would justify splitting it up.
I think it might be clearer to break up the Bay Area into SF, East Bay, North Bay and South Bay. These locations all take about an hour to travel between, which makes them comparable to London, Oxford and Cambridge (even Bristol). Including such a large area as a single category makes it much easier to rank top. Wikipedia reports that London is about 600 square miles, while the nine-county Bay Area is 7000. I appreciate that what counts as a city is not clear, but I’d definitely say the Bay Area is more than one city. (Alternatively, we could group ‘Loxbridge’ as one category.)
Seems plausible that it’d be worth making this change although it does seem complicated.
A lot of people commute from the East Bay into SF. It’s not clear to me whether somebody who lives in Oakland/Berkeley but works in SF should be included as ‘SF’ or ‘East Bay.’ Am I right that this is a lot less common in Loxbridge? If so, that makes the communities feel somewhat more distinct.
I don’t know England well enough to figure out where each city’s suburbs end but when I made a vague attempt to draw an area around Loxbridge, it seemed to be about 5,000 square miles. That’s actually pretty close to the area of the Bay Area, which is 3,000 square miles if you just include the four counties where (I think) the overwhelming majority of EAs live: Alameda, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and San Francisco. (You don’t have to travel through the other five counties to travel between these ones).
Minor: I’d say the travel times in ‘Loxbridge’ are somewhat longer than an hour.
Time from (e.g.) Oxford train station to London train station is an hour, but adding on the travel time from ‘somewhere in Oxford/London to the train station’ would push this up to ~2 hours. Oxford to Cambridge takes 3-4 hours by public transport.
The general topic looks tricky. I’d guess if you did a kernel density map over the bay, you’d get a (reasonably) even gradient over the 3k square miles. If you did the same over ‘Loxbridge’ you’d get very strong foci over the areas that correspond to London/Oxford/Cambridge. I’d also guess you’d get reasonable traffic between subareas in the bay area, but in Loxbridge you’d have some Oxford/London and Cambridge/London (a lot of professionals make this sort of commute daily) but very little Oxford/Cambridge traffic.
What criteria one uses to chunk large connurbations into natural language looks necessarily imprecise. I’d guess if you had the ground truth and ran typical clustering algos on it, you’d probably get a ‘bay area’ cluster though. What might be more satisfying is establishing whether the bay acts like a single community: if instead there is a distinguishable (e.g.) East Bay and South Bay community, where people in one or the other group tend to go to (e.g.) events in one or the other and visit the other occasionally (akin to how an Oxford-EA like me may mostly attend Oxford events but occasionally visit London ones), this would justify splitting it up.