yeah, you guessd it i'm an american intruding on a canadian post. i've been to toronto. more than once. and not just downtown either. i know montreal like the back of my hand too. i've also studied urban planning and statistics in college, although i'm no urban planner or statistician. that said, toronto is quite big but not nearly on the same scale as say n.y.c.,chicago,l.a.,or certainly mexico city. it's probably roughly the same size as a handful of america's largest cities/metro areas that come after n.y.,l.a. and chicago; like s.f.,wash dc/northern virgina,or boston. speaking of boston (which effectively has no metro government,let alone amalgamation), many people don't realize how huge it's metro/urban/sprawl is. the us federal government has streamlined and changed it's defenitions of "metro" areas. it's finally recognized that because of unique cultural,political and historic particularities, the traditional way of determining population,especially metro populations, by county,doesn't work in places like new england and new jersey (a tiny state with almost 9 million people but no city "officially" larger than 200,000 or so.) unlike almost all of the rest of the united states, counties in new england,especially massachusetts, have little or no meaning other than historic,where "county government" was abolished 15 years ago,but where they still exist in name for historic and legal reasons. you can go around metro boston and not realize you are not only outside the city limits but are in another county. cambridge (middlesex county) for example (harvard/mit,about 1 mile from downtown boston)is another city and county,but you wouldn't know it unless you were told.the city of boston (suffolk county) almost completely surrounds brookline (norfolk county),where conan o'brien,barbara walters and mike wallace come from. metro boston is around 5.8 million and the new combined statistical area (csa) metro classification makes it at around 7.4 million,5th largest in the u.s., larger than s.f.bay area or philadelphia,much bigger than atlanta or houston. the bos-wash megalopolis is roughly 55 million,the largest in the world. metro toronto's pop. is obviously growing at a good clip,but i think it'll take quite some time before it reaches the same scale of say chicago and a very long time before it compares to n.y and l.a. btw: i see a figure of around 110 billion us gmp someone quoted for toronto; that's got to be a mistake. at least 8-10 american metro areas are considerably larger than that with washington dc and boston at around 250 billion and n.y,l.a. and chi off the hook. i'm sure toronto gta has a bigger gdp than 100+billion usd.
