Apparently the new "urban" definition is something like:

>Adopting 500 persons per square mile (PPSM) as the minimum density criterion for recognizing some types of urban territory.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/03/24/2022-06...

Which basically means anything "town-like" or higher is "urban".

So most Americans live in urban areas even if they are in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere.

Yes. Most people see urban and imagine at least a 2nd or 3rd tier city in terms of population. Not a 5K person town that may or may not be within a not too long a drive of some sort of population center.

Urban in the sense of "don't need to own a car" is a much smaller slice--especially if you aren't adjusting your expectations.

Yeah the census counts urban as “a cop or ambulance will show up in decent time” and rural as “you could detonate a cow and nobody would be around to notice”.

Without knowing exactly which town you’re talking about, I would posit that that’s likely still dense enough to have some pretty direct comparison points somewhere in Western Europe. It’s not like all of Western Europe is a city.

Which doesn’t mean that the same infrastructure you’d see in a dense European city would make sense in your town, mind you. I just think that Europe and America aren’t as incomparable as some people seem to think.

Well, it's a typical more rural New England town. There is zero public transit of any sort. Essentially no businesses in town except barely when they merge with an adjacent small old mill city. So even in the town center where there are some sidewalks basically nowhere to walk to other than the library or post office. About 7K population total.

About an hour drive from a major city.

Though not that different really from small English countryside towns I've walked through.

That's one thing that fascinated me about CT when I was up there.

It seemed bizarre that even "one strip mall" towns didn't have certain categories of business. Down in the south, you can't measure a mile without hitting two serviceable Tex-Mex restaurants.

Up north? The nearest Tex-Mex is often 30 minutes away, and the nearest pizza place (which often isn't great) is 20 minutes.

I'm not sure how much decent Tex-Mex I've seen in the Northeast generally. I do have a few decent pizza places around where I live west of Boston. But generally speaking I find I'm on my own with respect to food. Which is a reasonable tradeoff I make.