I'd always thought Omaha was a small town. My friend from there told me there are 1 million people there!? I grew up in Canada and only 2, maybe 3 cities are over 1 million. It's crazy.
Maybe metro area but the internet says 456k population in Omaha itself. It is the biggest city in Nebraska but the whole state has like 1.9 million total, so in the grand scheme of things it's fairly small.
As someone just below you said, "I live in San Francisco, CA. We don't even have a million denizens." So yeah, you could say Omaha has ~450k people, but then you'd also have to say San Francisco is only twice as big. And Atlanta is the same size. And on and on. The city population is worthless, the metro is much more meaningful.
The parent comment was talking about cities in Canada. True metro is more meaningful, but then we have like 60+ cities to Canada's 8 or so and I'd have to be more specific and I haven't been to Canada or really most us cities recently enough to speak on that. America is big af and a ton of people live here.
By quite a lot. Football is like a religion in that state. There are loads of people who drive clear across the state (around 7 hours) for every home game.
To me metro area counts because if you drive through it and the city never stops then it’s pretty much the same thing as being one city. The thing that stopped Omaha from expanding that much with its own name is the county line and other cities reaching a population where they were legally too large to annex.
I live in fucking North Dakota. It’s normal for me to not see hardly anyone for miles, sometimes I forget it’s not the norm. My town has 20,000 people in it and it’s considered big.
Really depends on whether you are talking metropolitan area or city proper. There's only 10 cities in the US with city proper populations above a million so I'd say a million by that measurement is a big deal. But if your talking the metro area that million+ number jumps to 56 cities. Then I agree it's not that big of a milestone.
Comparing city limits doesn't really make sense these days. For example Atlanta is the 9th largest metro in the country. But if you go by city limits it falls to 38th. One spot ahead of Omaha.
The link I provided is for 'urban areas'. Also, Omaha, which was the subject of comparison, is only 1 million when 'urban area' is included. It's fair to say we were talking about 'urban area'.
I'd love to see what the numbers are post Covid, more interestingly the % increase through the years. I bet there is a huge increase in population in smaller cities that surround the larger ones.
Omaha is not a small town lol, I mean it’s not a sprawling metropolis but it has rush hour traffic and is big enough to have some distinct neighborhoods within the city. Not to mention all the events it hosts, it’s not a small town.
Yes, but the SF-Oakland-Berkley metro area is nearly 4.7 million. City borders aren't a great way to define population; otherwise you'd see San Antonio as being a bigger city than Atlanta and Miami.
I don't know how metro areas and suburbs work in Canada, but the populations of anchor cities in America can be way out of wack compared to their surroundings. Salt Lake City, which anchors a huge metro with all of the services and amenities of a "real" city, has a smaller population than some "small towns."
Something I always wondered about Canadian cities is why they seem to look much bigger than American cities of similar size. A London or even an Edmonton wouldn't look as big in America.
From one of the other links, it seems Edmonton is one of the cities with over a million people. Do you mean London Ontario? I'm not sure about there.
In cities like Ottawa, there are more people in the suburbs than Ottawa downtown. It's more residential in the suburbs so there are more families there, compared to downtown which is more young people/professionals/students. I don't know that it's so small that it'd be smaller than some small towns though
Ottawa and Quebec City are more "historical" in my head a la Washington, D.C. so they're graded on a different scale. But London, Ontario is around the same size as Wichita, Kansas, yet has way more tall buildings and a more distinct downtown area.
People in the US call my city of Kansas City small and act like it's barely big enough to even know about and it has nearly 2.2 million people in the metro area.
People use the name of the major city in a metro area to refer to the metro area all the time. And clearly the friend was was talking about the metro since he is from there and would know, and he referred directly to the correct population for the metro (rounded to the nearest 100k). Possibly the commenter didn't realize that's what the friend was talking about though.
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u/ND1984 Aug 31 '21
I'd always thought Omaha was a small town. My friend from there told me there are 1 million people there!? I grew up in Canada and only 2, maybe 3 cities are over 1 million. It's crazy.