The Northeast megalopolis (also Northeast Corridor or Acela Corridor;[2] Boston–Washington corridor, Bos-Wash corridor, or Boswash[3]) is the most populous megalopolis located entirely in the United States, with over 50 million residents, as well as the most urbanized megalopolis in the United States and the megalopolis with the world's largest economic output.[4] Located primarily on the Atlantic Ocean in the Northeastern United States, with its lower terminus in the upper Southeast, it runs primarily northeast to southwest from the northern suburbs of Boston to the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C..[5] It includes the major cities of Boston, Providence, Hartford, New York City, Newark, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.,[6] along with their metropolitan areas and suburbs. It is sometimes defined to include smaller urban agglomerations beyond this, such as Richmond and Norfolk, Virginia, to the south, Portland, Maine, to the north, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to the west.[7]
The megalopolis extends in a roughly straight line along a section of U.S. Route 1 and Interstate 95. As of 2010, the region contained over 50 million people, about 17% of the U.S. population on less than 2% of the nation's land area, with a population density of approximately 1,000 people per square mile (390 people/km2), compared to the U.S. average of 80.5 per square mile 2[8] (31 people/km2). America 2050 projections expect the area to grow to 58.1 million people by 2025.[9][10]
French geographer Jean Gottmann popularized the term in his landmark 1961 study of the region, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States. Gottmann concluded that the region's cities, while discrete and independent, are uniquely tied to each other through the intermeshing of their suburban zones, taking on some characteristics of a single, massive city: a megalopolis.
There are hundreds of colleges and universities in the region, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Columbia, Penn, Johns Hopkins, and Brown, all ranked among the top universities in the world.[11]
