I admit up front that this is kind of a fuzzy question. Sorry.
Take the largest metropolitan areas in the US – let’s say any metro area with a population over 500,000 as of 2007, which handily is the top 100 areas on the list I linked to. Which one is most isolated from all the others?
By “most isolated” I’m talking geographically – distance on the globe – not connections via air, etc.
And, as long as I’m asking, what’s the most isolated of the areas over 1,000,000?
Anchorage Alaska isn’t quite big enough to qualify by your criteria, but it’s pretty damn isolated since it’s in, you know, Alaska. According to Wikipedia the Anchorage metro area has 359,180 people. While it’s a bit small to be a “big” city, it should win the population/isolation ratio contest handily.
Maybe Las Vegas, not sure what it’s population is up to. I just remember flying there years ago at night and seeing this brightly lit oasis amidst a sea of darkness.
Typical Alaska-centrism, forgetting about Hawaii. Yeah, if we’re gonna include AK then it would be churlish to exclude HI, so Honolulu beats Anchorage like a red-headed stepchild.
I think we haven’t defined “isolated” rigorously. If we’re considering metro areas of over 500,000, then the simplest definition is the distance from any other metro area of over 500,000.
That’s the definition I’m working on. But where do we measure from? The edge of the counties in question, or the county seat where the most populous city is located?
Sorry for the vagueness of the OP, but part of the interest in a question like this is figuring out what terms make the most sense.
This was partly prompted by a claim I saw that Boise was the most isolated urban area in the US, which seemed plausible but something worth poking into. And of course the claim was not defined at all.
If we are talking metro areas, and the lower 48, gotta go with Denver. The front range is getting busy, but the closest city over a 1,000,000 pop is Salt Lake. 500 miles
2 million as of last fall, depending on who was counting. There was a minor local kerfuffle about it.
But Vegas isn’t all that far from Los Angeles. I’ll give you 'surrounded by a horrible gawdforsaken wasteland" (I’m not a fan of the desert), but it’s not terribly “isolated.”
Denver is only 70 miles from Colorado Springs, and Aurora (a suburb) is almost as big.
How did you get “closest”? According to that calculator, Salt Lake City is 294 miles from Boise, a lot closer than Denver. And El Paso is only 225 from Albuquerque, which makes the OP’s list.
BTW, the metric everybody seems to be focusing on is “maximum distance to nearest neighbor”. It might make more sense to suggest the most isolated is the one with the greatest average distance to the other 99. In fact, that should probably be a weighted average based on the populations of the cities.
