Travel to Canada

Cities Ranked and Rated: More than 400 Metropolitan Areas Evaluated in the U.S. and Canada, 1st Edition

Format: Paperback
Author: Bert Sperling
ReleaseDate: 30 March, 2004
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Rating:

Fat book of facts
The catagories were population,economy& jobs, Cost of living, Climate, Education, Healthcare, Crime, transportation, Leisure,arts& culture, and quality of life. I found this book a delightful conglomeration of every fact you might want to know about a city and it's livability. The charts, tables,and maps kept me in a sense of discovery! The info is really easy to understand and not too abstract. Peter Sander and Bert Sperling, the authors have a great background and created a very flowing publication. .

Truth: its a good book for most of us
Must be accurate for the others as well, right? So I would say it is actually very useful. I think this book is uncannily accurate in the way it described many cities with which I am familiar. . Anything with a gazillion bits of information will have some errors, but on the whole, trust me, it's a good book.

A Publisher's Huge Embarassment
. This book rates cities by several livability factors, then adds the ratings to determine who's #1 (it's Charlottesville, VA), who's #2 (Santa Fe, NM) . . all the way down to who's #331 (Laredo, TX), dead last.

In doing so, the authors have inadvertently switched the ratings of cities with the same name: Columbia (Missouri and South Carolina), Columbus (Georgia and Ohio), Decatur (Alabama and Illinois), Florence (Alabama and South Carolina) Jackson (Michigan and Mississippi), Lafayette (Indiana and Louisiana) and Springfield (Illinois and Massachusetts).

For example: Florence (Alabama) gets Florence (South Carolina's) rosey score for employment, while the latter is saddled with the former's rather grim employment score. Or, Jackson (Michigan) receives Jackson (Mississippi's) milder weather rating, while the latter is stuck with the former's rotten climate rating.

Since a city's ranking depends on the rankings of other cities, these astounding errors affect the final results of every other city listed in the book. You can verify this yourself by comparing ratings summarized in the beginning of the book with ratings in each city's profile.

This book is a fraud. If this had happened in health care or financial services, the authors would have been fired and their study withdrawn.

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