# The functional economic geography of the US

**Published by:** [Brandon Donnelly](https://brandondonnelly.com/)
**Published on:** 2016-12-08
**Categories:** commuter-patterns, commuters, commuting-patterns, diagrams, economic-geography, functional-economic-geography, mapping, maps, megaregions, plos-one, uncategorized, united-states, urban-regions
**URL:** https://brandondonnelly.com/the-functional-economic-geography-of-the-us

## Content

PLOS One recently published a paper and a set of maps that looks at commuter flows across the United States (over 4 million data points). The objective was to identify all of the country’s “megaregions.” Here is one of those maps. I think it says a lot.We often think of cities as having discrete boundaries and population counts, but the reality is that studies and maps such as these provide a much better sense of the overall economic geography of a place. It’s worth noting that the commuter dataset used for this study is from 2006-2010. So things may look a bit different today. The full report can be found here.

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