Right. Most people in "rural" places live in small towns. My wife went to high school in a rural Iowa town with 2,000 people. You can walk from the high school to anywhere in town in 30 minutes.
All the rural towns I've been to in Texas are just farm roads that you'd never want to walk down and towns with no real centers/plazas to hang out at (and you'd have to drive there anyways).
Then I moved to Mexico and they were on to something there: small towns have central plazas that are heavily used for social activities, young men and women can walk around meeting each other, and they build densely enough to where you can walk around the town.
So I envy anyone whose rural US upbringing is like your wife's. I didn't think we had that as an option anywhere in the US except for movies.
Most small towns in New England are laid out like those towns in Mexico. I wonder if it's a question of age? The pressure to create town squares must have been a lot higher before the automobile came around.
Samesies. It wasn't until my friend group in rural Texas got enough licenses that we could actually drive somewhere to hang out that spending time together outside of school became plausible.
A lot of older small towns are good but newer stuff tends to be built along highways with no other connecting roads, and more spread out
Also, a lot of the "rural" population in census data is actually living in outer suburbs and newer suburbs tend to be pretty unsafe for kids to walk/bike around
Then I moved to Mexico and they were on to something there: small towns have central plazas that are heavily used for social activities, young men and women can walk around meeting each other, and they build densely enough to where you can walk around the town.
So I envy anyone whose rural US upbringing is like your wife's. I didn't think we had that as an option anywhere in the US except for movies.