While not necessarily for or against this proposal, I want to point out that the idea of moving posts from city-specific forums into the broader regional forums wouldn't help the relatively low traffic in the New England forum, since none of those cities is in New England. But I'm okay either way on the proposal otherwise.
CMK10 mentioned that those not from the US might not know where certain places are, but isn't there a description of each region (with actual states listed) under the link to each forum?