Pretty much, here in America’s Third World County, yep: rural, all right. Purdue University has applied an “Index of Relative Rurality” to stats from American counties that illustrates the point pretty well.
A recently introduced, continuous, multidimensional measure of rurality, the Index of Relative Rurality (IRR), avoids the confusing effects of inclusion in metro boundaries. (2) It does not answer the question “Is a county rural or urban?” but instead addresses the question “What is a county’s degree of rurality?”
The IRR is based on four dimensions of rurality: population, population density, extent of urbanized area and distance to the nearest metro area. These dimensions are unquestioned in terms of their contribution to rurality and are incorporated implicitly in many existing rurality definitions. The index is scaled from 0 to 1, with 0 representing the most urban place and 1 representing the most rural place
(CLEEK to Embeegan, as TWC’s–relatively–vast alien invasion population might say *sigh*)
See that color code next to the bottom? That’s us. We’re not completely devoid of human habitation, and we do have access to–sort of–“urban” areas, but da “piney woods” is our “back yard” (and for many their front yard too), and there are parts of the county where YOU DO NOT GO even if you aren’t a terminally stupid “revenooer”.
A good place for a “bug out location”. Just sayin’.
Oh, you’ll notice I gave no further indication of which of those counties color-coded with the next-to-most-rural coding is America’s Third World County. Long time readers of this blog can pick it out right away, anyway.