[throwaway0a5e]

To play devil's advocate DC is more a part of the urban DMV area than it is anything else and most of middle America and the south (and a sizeable minority on the west coast) would argue that both the DMV and the northeast corridor are disconnected societies from the rest of the country.

[idiotsecant]

The US is a large and diverse country, no matter where you put the capital it will be in a society disconnected from the rest of the country. You could build the capital in a corn field in ohio and it would be culturally disconnected from the coastal areas which, importantly, is also where most of the people live.

[ceilingcorner]

Only about 40% of the population lives in a coastal county.

[riskable]

"Coastal counties" is super misleading. About 82% of the US population lives in coastal states and that figure goes up a little bit every year.

[throwaway0a5e]

Coastal states is a hell of a lot more misleading than "coastal counties"

The people of Bangor Maine and Buffalo NY have a hell of a lot more in common with the people of Cincinnati Ohio than they do with the people of Portland Maine and NYC.

On the west coast the "wealthy urban and suburban areas on the coast" vs "literally everywhere else" difference is even more stark. And I'm not talking about just the urban vs rural divide. The people of secondary cities resent being ruled by the interests of the major metropolitan areas as much as the rural folks do.

[pchristensen]

Ah, the snobby, coastal elite cities of El Paso, Amarillo, and Fairbanks :)

Cities/MSAs are the drivers of cultural identification in America, much less so than states.

[OldHand2018]

What is a coastal state?

Nearly 100% of Michigan is 150 miles or less from an international border that is in navigable waters. Is it a coastal state?

[rafram]

No, because nobody talks about the “north coast.”

[dragonwriter]

Yes, the great lakes are usually included as coasts (when not included, their exclusion is typically explicitly noted.)

[OldHand2018]

Exactly. I got downvoted unfortunately, which means that at least someone thought it was a ridiculous question. It's not.

Navigable Waters of the United States has a specific legal definition [1] and it has nothing to do with whether it's salt water or fresh water. So the question of whether a particular state is "coastal" based on proximity to salt water a valid question!

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/33/2.36

[matwood]

Are you defining coastal county as a county with at least one border on the coast? That's pretty misleading, as someone could live a 1/2 hour from the beach and not be in a coastal county. But, I think most people including that person, would consider themselves to be living on the coast.

[jonwachob91]

YUP! I live in Orlando FL, a city with no county boarders on the ocean. Orlando is 1 of 2 "inland" cities in the state (the other being Gainesville), but I drive 35m east and I'm at a beach on The Atlantic Ocean, or I can drive 90m west and be at a beach on the Gulf of Mexico. We are definitely a coastal city even if we aren't a coastal city :)

[dragonwriter]

> Only about 40% of the population lives in a coastal county

Counties have a variety of shapes and sizes, so that doesn't really tell you proximity to the coast, but a majority of the population lives within 50 miles of the coasts.

[showerst]

Almost 1/3 of the US population lives within about day's drive of DC - https://www.statsamerica.org/radius/big.aspx. That's pretty central given how spread out America is. You could certainly argue that they're culturally different from places like the midwest, but I don't think 'disconnected society' makes sense when they're such a substantial fraction of the total.

[1] Let's say a day's drive is around 400 miles, since if you go north traffic is rough.

[khuey]

1 in 6 Americans live somewhere in the Northeast corridor so it can't be that disconnected. There's plenty in common with the other large urban centers too.

[acjohnson55]

Is DC any more different from middle America than any city is from distant rural areas? Take NYC vs Upstate or Chicagoland vs Southern Illinois. Or even Louisville-Frankfort-Lexington vs rural Kentucky.

[jfengel]

Less so, arguably. Although DC is part of the Boston-New York-Washington corridor, it has a thriving culture that originated with the migration of black people out of the south. It is in no sense a rural culture, but it has roots and relatives in rural parts all over the south.

[rhino369]

Lack of good BBQ in the district calls into question its southern roots :)

[jfengel]

Sadly, it's not a great BBQ town. A buncha years ago the Washington Post ran a contest for a local food, and they best they could come up with was the half-smoke. Though I suppose you could put some mumbo sauce on it.

[andybak]

DMV?

[5555624]

I'm not sure who first used it; but, millennials and other young people started using the term about 15 years or so ago to refer to the Washington DC metro area -- District Maryland Virginia. The local media picked up on it and started using it. Old farts like me still think "Division of Motor Vehicles."

[yardie]

DC, Maryland, Virginia. The 3 share common borders and most of the DC politicians and workers actually live in the 2 states. It's only fairly recent that having a residence in DC became fashionable.

[riskable]

In my head every time I see that acronym I think, "Department of Motor Vehicles" but in this context it means:

DC - Maryland - Virginia

aka "The greater Washington, DC metro area"

[cool_dude85]

DC, Maryland, Virginia. Really as far as I know it just means like DC and its various exurbs. Not sure if even Baltimore is considered in the DMV.

[jcranmer]

Baltimore is a very distinct city with a distinct identity, although the border between DC suburbs and Baltimore suburbs is kind of vague; I wouldn't consider Baltimore part of the DC area.

My general cut of it would be Frederick - Leesburg - (follow US 15 south) - Gainsville - Quantico - La Plata - Waldorf - Bowie - Laurel - back to Frederick, although I'm not high confidence of the cuts on the MD side of the line.

[mncharity]

It does look like that maybe cuts MD tighter than VA: https://app.traveltime.com/search/0-lng=-77.03656&0-tt=45&0-...

[jcranmer]

As my sibling comment points out, VA sprawled a lot further than MD did. The US-15/Quantico line in the VA is really quite close to the boundary between suburban sprawl and true rural. Cross the Potomac, and you cross from sprawl on the VA side to rural lands on the MD side: the western and northern reaches of Montgomery County are definitely rural, similarly for the southern reaches of Prince George's County.

An additional factor to consider in the DC area is that the DC central business district is relatively weak compared to other major jobs centers: Arlington, VA (just across the river) has hefty job concentration, as does the Dulles-Tysons corridor; on the MD side, there's an additional jobs concentration on Rockville-Bethesda.

The final factor is of course the Baltimore-Washington divide. As you head northwest in MD, more people start commuting to Baltimore instead of Washington. So instead of there being a relatively clean sprawl/rural divide you can point to as a boundary, there is instead a more or less continuous sprawl that transitions from DC suburbs to Baltimore suburbs, and the mixing zone (particularly the Laurel-Columbia belt) is more accurately a suburb of both rather than one or the other.

[jfengel]

Virginia wanted to grow its exurbs, and Maryland didn't. Virginia created a lot of large houses on former farmland, where Maryland preserved more of it.

Maryland also did a better job of spreading out its employers. A lot of those Virginia exurbs still commute into DC, or at least Northern Virginia, making traffic a nightmare, at least during rush hour.

Another thing that slightly confuses that map: Virginia has much better arteries into DC. You get into DC from the south on I-395 and I-66, and they take you all the way downtown. Maryland has only surface streets. (It was supposed to have I-95 connecting straight through the city to join up with I-395, and I-595 where New York Avenue is, but that would have destroyed a lot of neighborhoods in exactly the way they were destroyed in building 66 and 395.)

That means that there's a fair bit of Virginia that is technically 45 minutes away from the center of the city, but not during rush hour. The 45 minute line in Maryland is pretty close in, but the 1 hour line turns out to be quite broad, because you can reach it on Maryland's interstates that flow pretty freely (parts of it, even during rush hour).

Of course you really should be taking public transport, except during a pandemic. The driving and parking are both horrible.

[ericmay]

I hadn't heard that term before either. Always just (maybe incorrectly) referred to the greater area is NoVa.

[showerst]

NoVa is specifically the northern Virginia part, people here wouldn't consider that to include any of DC or Maryland.

[softwaredoug]

DC - Maryland - Virginia. Basically Northern Virginia to Baltimore as one larger metro area.

[ceilingcorner]

D.C. Maryland Virginia