Still can't understand why so many metros feel the need for so many municipalities. It's nice to see my hometown doing things reasonably for a change.
In NE IL there are 273 municipalities representing about 8 M residents. Chicago is about a third of that population.
And dividing a metro area into 273 municipalities, each with their own local bureaucracy, doesn't seem crazy to you?
It's not about dividing the area, it's mostly about communities that were around for a long time with rural space between. Relatively few were new suburbs entirely created post WWII. However since then they all grew to the point where their borders touched. For example, in this 1874 map a majority of the DuPage communities are already present, primarily as stops along the rail lines.
