The issue was what is a "dense urban area". A city that is a suburb because of its relation to a another city can still be a dense urban area, and a sparsely populated municipality that is not a suburb can fail to be a dense urban area. San Jose is not a dense urban area, by any remotely reasonable standard.

> consider that your metric says that Berwyn and San Mateo are more like cities than Bellevue Washington,

All of those are cities, none of them are "more like cities". The issue was "dense urban areas", and certainly some of them are more "dense urban areas" than others, and that is easily and objectively verifiable.

> The idea that you might think San Mateo is more of an urban area than San Jose

You keep leaving out the key word "dense".

San Mateo is, objectively, more of a "dense urban area" than San Jose. Whether its more of an "urban area", density aside, isn't a entirely a well-defined question, but given that San Jose is basically a giant mass of the type of development referred to as "suburban sprawl" that just happens to be within a single legal jurisdiction that isn't a satellite of a larger municipality, I'd say by most reasonable standards its probably not more an urban area than most Peninsula cities, even if the latter happen to suburbs of San Francisco.)

Though, of colin_mccabe's examples, I'll agree that San Mateo isn't the best (Berkeley probably is).

With regard to San Mateo being "a suburb" without "any significant transit," I can't agree. I see people taking the bus all the time. There are a lot of people who work in downtown San Mateo and live nearby.