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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

You have to be careful with the 80/20 US Census split numbers between urban/rural. Between myself and a couple neighbors, we're on 100 acres next to even more conservation land. One neighbor has an apple orchard. Another a Christmas tree farm. The town I'm in is considered urban because we're near a major city and adjacent to another small city.

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But you are urban. You are near a major city, and adjacent another small one like you said. Urban versus rural is not a measure of closeness to nature, it's a measure of closeness to other humans.

It depends on your definitions. A lot of people would object to defining urban as encompassing having to drive anywhere except to connect to immediate neighbors. I can basically go to my two immediate neighbors. Otherwise I have to get in a car. Is that urban?

Sounds like a suburb. The real inefficient structures.

In what suburb do you have only two neighbors within walking distance?

Does America have a concept of walking distance?

It's a country road. There are no sidewalks. So no. It's not something you walk along. (And hardly unique to the US.) The ESRI categorization is ex-urban. The basic point is that the census bureau categorizes areas as urban unless they're really rural, as in small and pretty far from an urban center.

Rural is defined in USA here: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rur...

So that basically says that essentially no one in the state of MA is rural and that almost no one in the state of CA is rural. Which probably doesn't correspond to how average people think about rural vs. urban. So the fact that I can look off my back deck and see nothing but trees is a reasonable urban environment.

> and that almost no one in the state of CA is rural

Kinda crazy to see the entire I-5 length between San Francisco and Los Angeles classified as "metro". Perhaps the metric they're using doesn't work so well when counties (which is what they classify) are so large, and they primarily care that some city of over 50k people exists in it "somewhere". Some of those counties appear to be as large as or larger than some of the smaller states in the Northeast.

I'm sure there are reasons for the current classification. But there are certainly differences between I live on a hundred acres but I have decent shopping and culture relatively accessible and the nearest Walmart is 100 miles away.

As you suggest, a lot of what is classified as urban is not urban especially by the standards of someone who barely considers the South Bay as urban.

Huge parts of the California desert are also classified as urban as the counties are so large, some of those places are extremely remote. Even the western central valley, other than i5 cutting through it is remote and sparsely inhabited.

And, by the way, if you're going to go with binary definitions, it's perfectly reasonable to say that within 30 minutes of a Walmart and within a couple of hours of a significant city is a reasonable benchmark versus truly back of beyond rural. Just just don't expect that to correspond to an urban environment as many people understand that to mean.

Certainly I can normally go into town for an evening of theater but most people would consider my house to be in an urban setting.

I don't think your definition of rural matches with people who live in rural areas. Maybe that's why conversations around Urban vs Rural never make sense.

Statistically, most "towns" are considered urban, regardless of where they are located.

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