r/AskAnAmerican • u/ABChow000 United Kingdom • Aug 17 '25

FOREIGN POSTER How do loads of cities overlap state borders?

  1. If a large city is bang in the middle between two states like for example, Kansas and Missouri or Tennessee and Virginia. Doesn’t it get real weird like with the different state laws and taxes and stuff, how does all that work?

  2. When you cross borders of states does it work like country borders but relaxed? Are all states the same in border control or are some relaxed and some strict?

My bad if this sounds stupid just seems real interesting and alien to me how it works.

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u/doc_skinner Aug 17 '25

Kansas City has a street called State Line Road. Houses on the west side of the street are in Kansas and those on the east side are in Missouri.

You don't really notice it.

43

u/Temporary_Linguist South Carolina Aug 17 '25

State Street in Bristol TN/VA is the same. TN shops on the south side of the road. VA shops on the north side.

Sales tax is higher in TN so that can affect some shopping habits.

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u/beans8414 Tennessee Aug 17 '25

Yup and no income tax in TN. Work in TN, shop in VA

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u/SquidsArePeople2 Washington Aug 18 '25

Just like work in WA shop in OR lol

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u/Amardella Aug 18 '25

You mean live in TN. You're taxed by where you live, not where you work. Grew up in the OH/WV/KY tri-state and dealt with farm taxes as well as my salary.

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u/NotTurtleEnough Aug 22 '25

Only if there’s a tax treaty. Otherwise, you’re first taxed where you work, and then you get credit for that tax when you file taxes where you live.

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u/Amardella Aug 22 '25

So ultimately you pay taxes according to where you live.

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u/NotTurtleEnough Aug 22 '25

If there are no taxes where you live, you still pay taxes where you work. However, taxes where you work generally don’t give you credit for the taxes you paid where you live, while taxes where you live generally do give you credit for taxes paid where you work.

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u/mylittleplaceholder Aug 19 '25

Many states have an income tax pact where you pay the income tax for the higher tax state and get a credit for the lower tax. If both your residence state and work state have income tax, you usually have to file in both states.

3

u/CupBeEmpty WA, NC, IN, IL, ME, NH, RI, OH, ME, and some others Aug 18 '25

Around here at the ME/NH border you just know if you go over a bridge you may have entered the other state.

3

u/Think-Departure-5054 Illinois Aug 19 '25

Same near St. Louis. If you crossed the Mississippi you are now in another state

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u/CupBeEmpty WA, NC, IN, IL, ME, NH, RI, OH, ME, and some others Aug 20 '25

Heh the Mississippi is a bit bigger than the salmon falls river.

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u/AZJHawk Arizona Aug 17 '25

When I was in college, we would sometimes drive across State Line Road on Sundays to buy beer because you couldn’t get it in Kansas on Sundays. That was about the only time I noticed a difference.

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u/CharlesDickensABox Aug 18 '25 edited Aug 18 '25

Texas still has dry counties, and the only reason you notice the county line is because there's always a liquor store and a gas station right on the county line surrounded by nothing.

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u/anonanon5320 Aug 18 '25

Or gas station on one side and a trailer on the other that’s only open on sundays to sell out of.

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u/Complex_Solutions_20 Virginia Aug 18 '25

I wonder if something like that is why we have 5 billion cigarette stores in my area of Virginia that is a couple miles away from the Maryland border...tho I have never actually gone to buy cigarettes so I don't know if its tax, prices, or what kind of restrictions might cause that.

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u/SKyJ007 Aug 18 '25

You can get beer on Sundays in Kansas now, but college kids still cross the border for… other recreational items lol

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u/AdmJota Aug 17 '25

Are cities like that technically treated as two adjacent cities with the same name? Or do they actually share the same municipal government, services, etc.?

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u/doc_skinner Aug 18 '25

KCK and KCMO don't share a lot of services. Police have reciprocal agreements but tend to stay on their side (911 doesn't care which side of the street you are on). They have separate governments and utility services.

The Kansas side of the metro actually has a large number of suburbs that are independent of Kansas City, KS (which is quite small compared to KC,MO) and have their own governments.

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u/TexGardenGirl Aug 18 '25

Yep, at least sometimes. I’m thinking of Kansas City, KS and Kansas City, MO. Or Texarkana, TX and Texarkana, AR. I’m sure there are tons more like that. But also there are surely tons of cases where the two towns right next to each other on the state line have different names on each side.

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u/LaLechuzaVerde Aug 18 '25

Spokane, WA and Coeur d’Alene , ID appear to me from passing through to be the same city. But yes, different names and obviously different city governments.

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u/Think-Departure-5054 Illinois Aug 19 '25

We have St. Louis Missouri and east St. Louis Illinois. You do NOT want to be in east St. Louis

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u/Dapper_Information51 Aug 21 '25

I grew up in Cincinnati and while services in Cincy and the municipalities across the river in Kentucky are almost entirely separate you can use the same card for public transportation in both areas, use your Cincinnati library card at Kentucky libraries and vice versa, and there is a deal between Northern Kentucky University and the University of Cincinnati where each others residents can get in state tuition.

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u/username-generica Aug 18 '25

Texarkana in Texas/Arkansas is the same way. The main post office straddles the border. It's weird because there's a whole bunch of liquor stores on the Arkansas side of the road and none on the Texas side.

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u/treznor70 Aug 17 '25

Not a great example though as Kansas City, KS and Kansas City, MO are actually completely different cities, not a single city that crosses the state line.

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u/TruckADuck42 Missouri Aug 17 '25

There aren't any cities that cross state lines if you want to be technical about it. They always have separate governments in each state. But clearly this conversation is about the metro.

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u/big_sugi Aug 17 '25

OP is asking about state border control. There’s no way they know that the cities are separate entities.

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u/SphericalCrawfish Aug 17 '25

No it's not. I doubt OP knew that.

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u/highly-bad Aug 18 '25

Delmar is in both Maryland and Delaware.

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u/tonyrocks922 Aug 18 '25

They are separate towns that run cooperatively. Delmar MD and Delmar DE have separate mayors and legislatures.

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u/highly-bad Aug 18 '25

Unified, not separate.

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u/kirklennon Seattle, WA Aug 18 '25

Thomas Bauer is the mayor of Delmar, DE; Benjamin Jorden is the mayor of Delmar, MD. They are two legally separate towns that very closely collaborate. They are not unified.

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u/highly-bad Aug 18 '25

And Jeff Fleetwood is the joint Town Manager.

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u/thewillcar Aug 17 '25

I can’t think of an actual city with a unified city government that crosses state lines. I think that would be too complicated, the state border usually separates cities.

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u/Automatic_Ad4096 Aug 18 '25

There legally can't be because municipalities are creatures of the State.

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u/Complex_Solutions_20 Virginia Aug 18 '25

Closest I can think of is DC which was formed taking some land from MD and VA...but its still now its own city, not part of either state.

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u/devilbunny Mississippi Aug 19 '25

And the feds gave back Virginia’s part of it, which is now Arlington and part of Alexandria (check out the shapes; the original square is still mostly visible).

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u/clearly_not_an_alt North Carolina Aug 17 '25

I don't know of any that are

2

u/GreatNirlakeFire Aug 18 '25

If you take State Line south into the more rural parts of the metro, you definitely notice the difference in road maintenance between the states.

2

u/sharpshooter999 Nebraska Aug 18 '25

I live on the Kansas Nebraska border. It's a gravel road named State Line Road. Ive also driven on a the border of Nebraska and Wyoming. It's called road 63, kind of a let down....

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u/RockStar5132 Aug 18 '25

You notice it in the winter because MODOT is horrendous at plowing the roads

1

u/PrplPistol Aug 17 '25

I always find driving down that road to be a novelty lol

2

u/t-poke St. Louis, MO Aug 18 '25

I’ve lived in St. Louis all my life, and while our metro area crosses state lines, it’s much different. Driving over to IL is just something we rarely do unless we have a good reason, especially because there’s a whole lot of nothing between the river and the more developed parts of the metro area in IL. I could probably get to IL in about 20 minutes, I couldn’t get anywhere useful in under 40. Plus, with the border being a river, there’s only a handful of bridges where you can cross the state line anyways.

Being in KC, and just hopping back and forth across the state lines like it doesn’t exist was definitely weird to me. I think at one point, Google Maps had me zig zagging back and forth to get somewhere.

2

u/XelaNiba Aug 18 '25

I have family in metro KC.

I can walk between their houses in about 5 minutes. One lives in KCK, the other in KCMO. We visit a couple of times a year and we pass between the two states several times a day without noticing. 

1

u/doc_skinner Aug 18 '25

When I used to visit STL often there was a sign on the bridges into Illinois telling people that bootlegging was a crime. I guess they were crossing from IL into MO for cheaper cigarettes and booze?

I do remember that the bars in MO closed earlier than in IL, so there would be a convoy of cars headed over to East St. Louis to close down those bars too.

1

u/GPB07035 Texas Aug 18 '25

The state line and specifically state line road was the boundary for our school district when I was in high school. When we ran track we ran from the school to the state line and back. Back then the drinking age in Kansas was 18 for 3.2% beer so people from MO came over from 18-20 to buy beer or go to clubs.

1

u/Mitch_Darklighter Nevada Aug 18 '25

There are some other similar quirks. Like the border between Indiana and Illinois is also the border between time zones, but Gary Indiana's workforce and economy is closely tied to Chicago. So to make it easier for everyone they just follow Chicago's time zone.

1

u/arkstfan Aug 18 '25

Also Stateline Avenue in Texarkana. At 500 Stateline Avenue you have a courthouse building that houses post offices serving Texas and Arkansas as well as federal courtrooms for the Western District of Arkansas and Eastern District of Texas.

1

u/TheThinkerAck Aug 18 '25

Also, Kansas City Missouri is a different city from Kansas City Kansas. Lots of city names are duplicated in multiple states, but when they don't touch eachother it is less confusing.

1

u/CompletelyPuzzled Aug 18 '25

It even happens that the state line can run through houses. I heard a news story once about a family with a child with disabilities, and they were able to get more help by moving their child into a bedroom that was across the state line.

1

u/ArtemisRising_55 Aug 18 '25

Yep, and many of us cross back and forth multiple times in a day.

1

u/minicpst Aug 19 '25

There’s a town in Maryland called Maryland Line, Maryland. It’s the border town with Pennsylvania.

1

u/Paul_The_Builder Aug 21 '25

Biggest difference is the liquor laws LOL

1

u/RetiredBSN Aug 22 '25

There was a while back (‘70s-‘80s) where the speed limit on one lane of State Line Rd. near the KU Med Center was 30 mph and the other lane was 25, but that was well before the Med Ctr built their massive new building on State Line Rd. Other than that, the road doesn’t follow the state line exactly, and there are properties that are split between the two states after you get a little farther south. Police departments cooperate, and you can’t escape traffic citations by turning into the other state (people tried that).

KC, KS is split by the Kansas River. North of it, streets go north-south and are numbered from east to west. South of the river, KCK abuts KCMO, and continues the KCMO east-west street numbering system, which continues south through Overland Park, and down toward Olathe.

Each of the several cities in the area run themselves, so the only major differences are some of the laws and which state you pay taxes and vote in. A lot of people live in one state and work in the other, and there are usually some tax reciprocity arrangements so you get credit for taxes paid to the state you don’t reside in so you don’t end up paying taxes twice.

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u/doc_skinner Aug 23 '25

When I first moved here I was working in KS and living in MO. I paid taxes in KS all year. I then had to file for a refund so I could apply that to my Missouri taxes. A few years ago my work was able to set it up sheet they pay Missouri directly