Why? It works pretty much everywhere in America except CA.

61% of Americans live in a town of less than 50,000 people.[1]

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/05/america-a-nat...

This is an incredibly misleading statistic. When you describe "a town of less than 50,000 people," what comes to mind most easily is some sort of rural town. But at your link, I recognize several of the places on that "fastest-growing" list. Leander is a suburb of Austin, Little Elm and Forney are both suburbs of Dallas, as are (scrolling down) Frisco and Farmers Branch, while Boerne is a suburb of San Antonio, and Georgetown is a suburb of Austin again.

Most of these, you wouldn't know you were in a separate city if you didn't pay close attention to roadside signs, and I suspect the same is true of a large percentage of that 61% figure.

That says something, since those people didn't choose to live closer to the central of the metro area, but it doesn't say as much as you're implying it does, because they're all examples of places for which, if someone outside of Texas asks where they live, they're going to say "Austin" or "Dallas" or "San Antonio," and only if asked where in Dallas will they respond Little Elm, just as they might otherwise respond Lakewood or Hamilton Park, which are neighborhoods but not separate cities.

How's that deal with attached suburb-cities and town-in-city-enclaves? Are parts of major metro areas excluded? I bet 300-400 thousand of the people in my metro area live in such sub-50k "towns" but actually they live in the city—go a few blocks over and it looks exactly the same, but now you're "in the city" instead of "in a town". Perhaps that many again live in places far-flung enough that you could maybe count them as independent towns, but aside from local fast food workers they all commute to the city for work.

If you include the burbs as part of the definition of city then what are we even talking about? If they're completely detached then they're not suburbs.

That's the point, I think. Most metro areas are made up of a collection of many incorporated areas which collectively make up what people think of as the city. Some of those incorporated areas are large, some are small, and you might not realize you're driving from one to another since nothing changes except which legal entity collects the property taxes.

Yeah, my city totally surrounds several sub-50k "towns", plus has several others glommed on to the side of it that you'd be forgiven for not realizing are separate from the city, and it's not even an extreme case (see St. Louis for that)

A sibling comment of yours mentions Leander; there's only one train in Austin, and it goes from downtown to Leander. So you could even get there without a car. Good luck once you get there, though.

So uh, apparently the answer is "it doesn't.'