Talk:Central Coast (California)

Regions & Counties

What's the value of having regions and counties? Aren't the counties just official sub-regions of the region? --(WT-en) Evan 23:16, 28 June 2006 (EDT)

Counties are unamiguous units whose boundaries don't need to be discussed -- this saves a lot of time. The fact that we have counties does not preclude endless debate over how else we could balkanize the landscape, it just provides an unambigous region that stuff can be placed into while regions are hashed out endlessly. For example, putting Fremont into Alameda County shut up the endless angels-on-a-pin arguments about whether it is in the Silicon Valley, South Bay (Bay Area), or East Bay (Bay Area).

For areas like the Gold Country, it solves the problem of partitioning: there are a metric boatload of cities in that region, and I have no basis for partitioning them. The solution? Counties. -- (WT-en) Colin 23:50, 28 June 2006 (EDT)

I agree that for US states counties are fantastic. OK if I drop the other regions? --(WT-en) Evan 00:00, 29 June 2006 (EDT)

Are you saying that you want to do away with (for example) the Bay Area (California) region and instead use Contra Costa County, Alameda County, etc? If that's the case then I'd be very much opposed - counties work well in some cases, but very poorly in others. My understanding with counties was that that would become sub-regions, and that a county might not always be wholly contained in a single region (see Kern County). I think that there is room for both counties and non-county regions, but maybe I'm misunderstanding. -- (WT-en) Ryan 00:40, 29 June 2006 (EDT)