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Comment by jjav | Hacker News Reader

> I live in the US and my kids walk and bike to school. You're making wide generalizations across a large country.

I've learned from HN discussions that there is a vast difference in what people think of as a "suburb".

Some will say it takes over 30 minutes by car from a suburb to the nearest store. To me that's very rural, I'd never consider that a suburb. But some do. So we get these disconnected discussion on how you can/can't do such and such thing in a suburb.

I've nearly always lived in what I consider suburbs. Places with single family homes and parks and playgrounds where I can very easily walk to just about every store or service nearby. The middle schools is an easy walk away for kids. High school is a bit farther but still an easy bike ride for high-school age kids (about 15 minutes).

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> I've learned from HN discussions that there is a vast difference in what people think of as a "suburb".

In Australian English, “suburb” roughly means “neighbourhood”. So to us, downtown (or the CBD as we call it), is a “suburb”. In the Australian sense of the term, the Financial District and the Upper East Side are suburbs of New York City.

Yes, when I used to live in Australia them calling everything a 'burb, including the middle of the town, was a bit confusing.

Yeah, when I visited down there I initially misinterpreted what the "CBD bakery" was selling... xD

> To me that's very rural

That's the idea if used in the North American sense. Suburbs are effectively rural areas, except with a higher population density. You will see rows of houses instead of rows of corn, but otherwise no different.

> Places with single family homes and parks and playgrounds where I can very easily walk to just about every store or service nearby.

What's a town, then?

Suburbs are usually grafted onto towns (and within a few minutes of stores), not in the middle of nowhere. That would just be bizarre.

> Suburbs are usually [...] would just be bizarre.

Usually, yes, but I know of settlements "out in the middle of nowhere" that are nothing but rows of houses. No businesses, schools, or anything of that sort found within the immediate community. One needs to drive through the vast corn fields to another town to access such amenities. It doesn't seem that bizarre.

> (and within a few minutes of stores)

For those at the nearest edge, no doubt. Those at the furthest edge could be quite a distance away. Although, even in a small suburb, often you find the craziest road systems. It might take a half an hour just to drive to a store only a mile away.

Suburbs surely do have crazy road systems, all meandering and looping back into themselves instead of connecting to the rest of the world. But you are greatly exaggerating how much this adds to trip times, I've never seen nor heard of cases where it might take 30 minutes to escape and reach a store. If you have any specific examples in mind, I'd love to gawk at them.

Personally I just hate the aesthetic of suburbs, so I'll never live in one, but I think some people in this thread are getting a bit hyperbolic about how inconvenient they are. The suburb in my town takes no more than five minutes to drive across and is directly adjacent to the grocery store. From what I've seen this is typical. The worst I've seen are those in the DC metro area, but even then they have stores all over the place. The real pain in the ass in that region is needing to use/cross multilane roads to get anywhere.

> I've never seen nor heard of cases where it might take 30 minutes to escape and reach a store.

Well, me neither. I grew up on a production farm with actual rows of corn as far as the eye can seen – in what I am quite sure everyone would agree was decidedly rural – and there were still several different towns with stores within a 5-10 minute driving radius.

> I think some people in this thread are getting a bit hyperbolic about how inconvenient they are.

No doubt, but that doesn't really have much to do with the conversation. The conversation is about what we call the places that are just rows upon rows of housing without a shared and vibrant mixture of businesses, hospitals, schools, etc. They're not exactly rural, there are too many people living there to be considered rural, but they aren't like towns or cities either. They are more like rural than anything else.

Suburb seems to be the prevailing term.

> What's a town, then?

A town is a collection of suburbs and the parks, amenities and businesses that are intertwined with them.

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