Austin is (still) No. 1

​​AUSTIN – We get it, we get it: Austin isn’t alway​s like the rest of Texas.

Certain folks love to call the city "the People’s Republic of Austin," due to its liberal policy and undying embrace of the strange.

Austin’s population is so large that if it were a state, it would be the 45th largest in the U.S., according to a study by LawnStarter, a local lawn care service.

Why grass-cutters are concerning themselves with comparative demographics, I’ll never know.​

Nonetheless, the company used city and U.S. Census data to count Austin’s teeming masses at 943,795 people, higher than those of Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.

​The study is quick to point out that land-wise, these beautiful states are all massive compared to ATX.

If you plopped 326-square-mile Austin in the middle of Alaska (a sprawling, 656,424-square-mile snow beast), it would look like one of those little birds hitching a ride on a hippo.

Even delicate, syrup-drenched Vermont is 30 times larger than Austin when it comes to area, at 9,615 square miles.

Now, there are much larger cities in the U.S. 

Austin is only the 11th largest, and Houston, Dallas and San Antonio all pack more people in than Austin does.

However, the entire Austin metro area is the country’s fastest growing, and it recently hit the two-million-people mark.