From ‘BaltWash’ to ‘LosDiego,’ Megalopolis Seems Here to Stay

Baltimore and Washington once shared little besides I-95, the American League and Eastern Time. Baltimore was blue-collar muscle, Washington white-collar power; there were Orioles and Colts fans, and there were Senators and Redskins fans.

Now there is Allan Fleming, who lives in this community near the divide in the Washington-Baltimore commuter sheds. “He’s a real big Orioles fan and a dyed-in-the-wool Redskins fan,” says Fleming’s wife, Pepper.

He is also a resident of BaltWash, one name for the continuously populated region of 6 million people stretching from north-central Virginia to eastern West Virginia to the Pennsylvania line.

The 1990 census will almost certainly redefine greater Washington and Baltimore as one Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area--”the largest merger of metropolitan areas in world history,” according to Census Bureau demographer Richard Forstall.

When the century began, Americans lived in isolated spots of farmland and open country, or huddled together in central cities and towns. As it moves into its last decade, they are sprawling out in all directions.

“Metropolitan areas are bumping into each other,” says Peter Muller, a University of Miami urban geographer. “It’s been happening for years, but now you can really see it.”

You can see it in the region between Boston and Washington, where “Megalopolis”--the vast city forecast by Jean Gottman 30 years ago--now includes 25 contiguous metropolitan areas and one-sixth of the nation’s population.

The Census Bureau says the four most advanced sections of Megalopolis are Boston-Providence; New York-Philadelphia; Harrisburg-York, Pa., and Washington-Baltimore. Within each section, substantial numbers of people live in one metro area and commute to another.

The metropolitan economies of Baltimore and Washington are the most tightly entwined. Here in Columbia, 24 miles from the Washington Monument, 14 from Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, couples like Bob and Susan Klukas rise each morning and head off in opposite directions, she toward Baltimore, he toward Washington.

Their big city loyalties are mixed. They read both the Sun and the Post, but Susan says they are more apt to visit downtown Baltimore, which is an easier drive.

Fellow Columbians Pepper and Allan Fleming, on the other hand, find themselves attending more social functions in Washington, where he is an executive at the Washington Times.

Residents of BaltWash exult in the area’s great variety of goods, services and attractions. You can take in opera at Washington’s Kennedy Center one night and visit the National Aquarium in Baltimore the next day. When Washington’s baseball Senators and Baltimore’s football Colts defected, the sting was eased by the presence of the pro teams that remained.

Each of the merging metro areas is becoming more economically diverse. Washington is known for bureaucracy, but its immediate suburbs have many high-tech industries. Baltimore’s skyline is now characterized not by smokestacks but office towers.

Others see a darker side to BaltWash. When Columbia resident Howard Knudson was growing up in the suburbs west of Baltimore, there was still plenty of open space. Now, says his wife Jean, “the traffic is awful, and every square inch has something on it--houses, townhouses or apartments.”

BaltWash--or WashBalt--is just one part of the emerging Megalopolis. New York and Philadelphia are meeting in Bucks County, Pa.; Princeton, N.J., and along the highways leading to the Delaware River. Northern New Jersey, Muller notes, “is beginning to fill in. There are no real breaks in the urban landscape.”

Although the city of Boston has fewer than 600,000 people and covers only 47 square miles, its metropolitan domain stretches north into New Hampshire, west to Worcester and south to Rhode Island. “Boston has been doing this for so long,” marvels Forstall of the Census Bureau. “It absorbed Cambridge in the 1800s and never looked back.”

A continent away, Los Angeles and San Diego are on a collision course as new housing clusters pop up in the arid expanses between them. The San Francisco Bay Area has become one vast metropolis in which San Franciscans make up only 13% of the population.

Specialists debate how far and fast this expansion will go, but Rutgers University urban affairs expert George Sternlieb says one thing is clear: “The United States is decentralizing faster than any society in history.”

Arthur C. Nelson, a planner at Georgia Tech, says his research shows that if present trends continue, by 2020 or 2030 almost half of the mainland could be classified “exurban”--places where people live on five-, 10- or even 30-acre tracts, and drive fairly long distances to jobs, social engagements, and other destinations.

The only land with nothing on or near it, he says, will be government-owned or “undevelopable,” such as mountains and flood plains.

Nelson is struck by the speed with which industry is moving beyond the urban periphery. Once, manufacturers needed to be near the city’s workers and rail lines, but now tax laws and land prices encourage them to spread out, as long as they remain within a day’s truck ride of the city.

That requires limited-access highways, of which the nation has plenty. Federal transportation planner Douglass Lee says one-third of the interstates carry fewer than 8,000 vehicles a day--enough to fill only a two-lane street. For every I-95, busy from Florida to Maine, there is an I-88, virtually empty from Albany to Binghamton, N.Y.

Such routes do not serve American settlement; they spread it. “Look at the map of the interstate system,” says Rutgers historian Robert Fishman, “and you will see the future of the American city.”

In other words, the future lies in such places as Ulster County, N.Y., and Loudon County, Va., where the city dweller now still can find the balm of open space.

The walls seem to be closing in. Gertrude Stein once observed, from the vantage point of crowded Paris, that “in the United States there is more room where nobody is than where everybody is. That is what makes America what it is.”

Or was.