The Answer to your Question

Invariably while communicating with the people state-side, I am asked how big a city Manila is in comparison to Seattle, which is really the biggest city most of my friends and family are familiar with, I generally laugh and say that Manila is larger. I finally decided to put some work into the answer, and enlisted Jonathan's help with some population graphs to go with my answer. First, I would like to share with you my Seattle/Manila Diagram, after considerable work and some math, I created a info-graphic to show you the relative size of Seattle to Manila.

So, as you can see, Metro Manila is divided into more manageable areas, just as Seattle has Ballard, Fremont, Queen Anne, Capitol Hill and Downtown. Manila proper itself has just over 1 million people. We live in the Quezon City area, just on the edge of Pasig. We attend church in Makati and David attends school just a bit past Marikina- into the tan area that is not considered part of Manila. The little red dots on the Seattle map denote some areas I used to spend my time- SPU, Capitol Hill, Discovery Park, Greenlake and the Woodland Park Zoo.


Driving around here is a challenge, there are a LOT of cars and motorcycles, and pedestrians and street hawkers- on a road that is comparable to Hwy 99. You have to be alert and checking all around you all the time, while wondering if you are still going the correct direction- as many of the streets are not labeled, and the ones that are are labeled by their original name instead of what everyone calls it. EDSA for example, is labeled 'Epifanio de los Santos Ave' on Google maps, so trying to find it is tricky until you learn all the little quirks.
Here is an image of a typical day traveling on EDSA- and of the road (Ortigas Extension) that we take to get to David's school- in the morning before it becomes congested.

And finally, I get to share Jonathan's graph to give you an idea of how many people are sharing the city.

We wanted to compare the number of people per square mile, first in the US as a whole to Washington State, which we then compared to the Philippines as a whole, then to be fair, the 2 cities. The numbers jump dramatically from a country to a city- but the number between the city of Seattle and Manila is staggering.
In conclusion, the answer to your question is that Manila is roughly 5 times larger in area and 4 times more crowded.