A lot of comments about metros areas and the like, such as how Jacksonville shows up because of city limits being larger than atlanta, but if you start getting I to trying to define what a city's metro area is, you run into a lot of issues with giant powerful cities like NY. Can you really count the population of Newark, New Jersey as part of NYC, NY? Even though newark is firmly within the NYC metro area, it's a sep…
Another way would be to count everyone as part of the population of whatever city they are physically closest to, without regard to political boundaries. But this would probably just get you a list of sprawling metropolitan areas.