It struck me as a warmer version of Norway, a comparison noted by my "aunt-in-law" and her husband, which is significant support since she's from here and she's from there (I wound up meeting them for the first time in Norway and the second time a week later in Vancouver).

Density can make a big difference though, no doubt, and it tends to depend on how you measure. For example, rt mentioned DFW; by incorporated area, Dallas barely makes the top ten (9th); it's only third largest IN TEXAS (Houston is 4th and San Antonio 7th). On the other hand, by metropolitan area Dallas is 4th and Houston drops to 6th (surprisingly, the difference is <500,000 yet still leaves room for Philly between them), while San Antonio drops to 25th. You can also go by combined statistical area, in which case DC and Boston, two cities that barely make the top 25 in the first list and the top ten in the second, shoot up to 4th and 5th, while DFW drops back to 7th and Houston to 9th. You COULD even go by the list of megaregions, and then the Great Lakes (including Chicago, but also places like Detroit, Milwaukee, Minnesota-St. Paul and Minneapolis, just off the top of my head) is on top, followed by the Boston to DC area (it says something about how many people live in the Midwest that there are LESS people in the combined area of the 1st, 4th and 5th largest combined statistical areas). For the immediate future I'm still a little leery of that one though because it's still rather speculative, emergent and in some ways simply messed up badly. Everything rom Cascadia down is "mega" only in the geographic sense, and Houston manages to be in both the Gulf Coast AND Texas Triangle megaregion, suggesting those are really a single megaregion centered around Houston and slightly larger than Southern CA (though still dwarfed by the Great Lakes and Northeast).

For my money metro's the way to go, because all major cities inevitably have a multitude of smaller surrounding, nominally independent, cities and towns reduced to mere extensions of the core metropolis. Sometimes they even exist WITHIN the larger cities from which their governments (but little else). Bellaire is completely surrounded by Houston; Arlington, the 50th largest US city by incorporated area, is undoubtedly a part of the metropolitan area formed by Dallas to the east and Fort Worth to the west. Depends on your metric, and with 20,000,000 in the NYC metro area pretty much every US city but L.A. and Chicago likely seems dinky to Tom.