Among cities with the same name, which one people are probably talking about given their location

Throughout the United States, there are a surprising number of cities that have the same name. In fact, after playing with this interactive map by Russell Samora for The Pudding, it seems more likely that cities share a name with another than not. (Don’t quote me on that.)

The question is: When someone mentions a city, which one are they talking about? Samora calculated the likelihoods, given the county that person lives in. For example, when someone refers to Buffalo, most people are probably talking about Buffalo, New York. If you live in Buffalo, Kentucky, then probably not.

You can also mess around with your likelihood metric here.

See also: street names across the country.

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Map of highway signs

This is a fun map by Matt Dzugan. Search for a city, and see the segments of highway in the United States that are headed that way:

I set up thousands of queries to Google Maps, asking for directions from Point A to Point B and parsed its responses, looking for the text toward ___, signs for __, and ramp to ___.

This enabled me to build a database of all the segments of road that are listed as heading towards various cities.

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Where people moved during the pandemic

In another look at migration through the lens of USPS change of address data, Bloomberg CityLab shows where people moved during the pandemic, focusing on movement in and out of metro areas. With the exception of San Francisco and New York, most areas didn’t see much movement distance-wise:

Even in the biggest metro areas, most people didn’t go very far. In the country’s 50 most populous cities, 84% of the moves were to somewhere within the perimeter of the central metro area, down just slightly from pre-pandemic levels. Many of the most local moves were likely related to the economic downturn: A February Pew Research Center survey of those who moved during the pandemic found that the most common reason people cited was financial distress including job loss.

See also similar conclusions by The New York Times and Financial Times.

While there wasn’t the mass exodus that some imagined, the pandemic did seem to speed up some trends. So as we wait for the 2020 Census count, which comes out out this afternoon, it’ll be interesting to see if the rate of change continues in the coming years.

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Shift of Covid-19 deaths to medium and small cities

When this all started, Covid-19 was impacting large cities at a much higher rate than everywhere else. This straightforward chart from NPR shows how the share of deaths in small and medium cities has made its way up to over half of all weekly Covid-19 deaths.

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Urban Ecology: where the wild meets the city

  Urban Ecology: where the wild meets the city   post-info Urban ecosystems are expanding around the world as people migrate to cities and the human population continues to grow. What happens to other species

Does Urbanization Always Drive Economic Growth? Not Exactly…

We often think of cities as major drivers of economic development and growth. Big cities expand our access to infrastructure like public transit and public education. They allow for more efficient distribution of social services such as government assistance and … Continue reading »

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