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Huh. As an outside I always had the impression SF had at least a couple mil running about. That's a surprisingly low number in my eyes.
In American cities the nature of local government (and the fact that wholesale reorganization from above is very rare) means that many cities are not in fact cities. Los Angeles is a famous example - important districts of the city (like Santa Monica, Long Beach, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood) are not technically part of the city of Los Angeles. The county has 88 cities and unincorporated area (another largely American invention) which together make up the city. That city, in turn, is part of the wider 'metropolitan area' that includes a large number of other towns and cities in neighboring counties. So in LA, only 4 million of the 10 million people who live in Los Angeles actually live in Los Angeles (city).
The San Francisco Bay Area has about 8 million people. Travel distances within the Bay Area are similar to those within other recognized highly sprawled cities. In many other countries, Oakland and SF would be one city, for example, as they are an unbroken (except by water) urban area. The Houston metropolitan area, for example, is larger than the entire Bay Area.
Ah, I was dimly aware of that, but thank you for explaining the larger picture.
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For details, see the Census Bureau's map of municipalities, urban areas, and micropolitan/metropolitan/combined statistical areas.
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