Oh hi there
I guess I’m not “most people”, as my city definition is definitely tied to prominence rather than population. I guess it comes with growing up in an “urban area” with a population that doesn’t even show up when you click on the profile (around 12 to 15,000, not including the college). The most populous urban area I’ve lived in has a current population of ~250,000 (Tri-Cities, WA), so I will admit I don’t really have much experience with big cities.
The issue for me with raising the “city” threshold is that (for example) having Rapid City, Summerset, and Box Elder at the same level of classification doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense (granted some of that is on the Census Bureau for granulating that area so finely, I don’t think Summerset and Box Elder deserve their own urban areas outside of Rapid). Maybe adding some sort of state population/population density adjustment to the proposed major/minor urban area cutoff value would help mollify small-state concerns? If, say, SD was an independent country our “city” threshold would be around 10,000 people (which is how the classification works out now, which also corresponds roughly to the high school sports classification (go Spartans)) but that’s not realistic for the rest of the US.
As an aside, the urban areas drawn by the Census Bureau aren’t the most accurate in places (at least where I’ve looked in SD). Doubt it would affect a scheme like this all that much (probably only missing a few hundred people here and there) but just wanted to get that on the record.