

Ask HN: Where can I find a US city to metro-region association? - xrusos

For example, the SF Bay Area is commonly broken down to the City, Peninsula, North Bay, East Bay and South Bay.  I need to build a region to city association table and wonder if someone (or site) has done the work for me.  For example, I'm looking for Peninsula: Atherton, Belmont, Brisbane, Burlingame ... Woodside.  Or East Bay: Alameda, Albany, Berkeley, ... Walnut Creek.
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cjensen
Beware... from working on Wikitravel I can tell you that you need to be
careful because most region labels do not have a precise definition.

For example, Silicon Valley is a prestigious label. There is tendency for
surrounding communities to try to relabel themselves into it. Fremont, Redwood
City, and Menlo Park were excluded from the original definition, but now the
definition has been stretched to places as far afield as Aptos and Pleasanton.

The labels "South Bay" and "East Bay" precede the existence of Fremont.
Depending on the definition used, Fremont can be slotted into either category.

Wikitravel eventually did what Craigslist does: give up and redefine the terms
to mean a specific set of counties. For example, on Craigslist the term "East
Bay" is defined as Alameda and Contra Costa counties. It may not be perfect,
but it lets you assign the specific boundaries so that you can move on to real
work instead of spending all day fussing with the boundaries.

Good luck finding what you are looking for. Just keep in mind the flaws in the
result.

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xrusos
Very good. I found a handful of well organized lists on Wikitravel, but as you
state there were far too many inconsistencies between major metro areas.

I did end up finding that OpenTable has done the hard work here for us. If you
visit their sitemap: <http://www.opentable.com/opentable-sitemap.aspx> and
view source you'll see that they have a very well organized list of regions
and matching cities.

This was likely a manual process for them, but from the looks of it, they had
the manpower to do it right. Very clean and comprehensive data.

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xrusos
OpenTable has the best list I've found of region to city associations.

<http://reviews.opentable.com/0938/allreviews.htm>

