Measuring rurality An inhabitant of Vermont boasted on his web site that that is the most rural of all the fifty states.
But Alaska, with fewer than a million people in an area bigger than France, has a far lower population density.
If you spread the people out uniformly over the land, they're farther apart in Alaska than in Vermont.
But they're not spread out uniformly.  If distances between neighbors is averaged over people rather than over land, the average Alaskan might be much closer to his neighbors than the average Vermonter.
So how should one measure rurality?
 A: This seems to me to not be a methodological question but a conceptual or theoretical one. Definitions of rural, like any socially constructed definition (and this is clearly one, since apart from population density, how do you define it?) need to be based on your purpose.
I work for a federal grantmaking agency. We need to define rural for policy and political-related purposes. We have federal regulations that tell us we need to use Rural Urban Continuum Codes (RUCC, also called Beale codes), produced by the USDA's Economic Research Service (see here). But where is the cutoff point? There are also the Rural Urban Commuting Area (RUCA) codes, which are down to the Census tract and consider proximity to urban centers as well as population. But again, where is the cut point? We met with the ERS folks and other researchers and no one would stake a claim to say "This is how you should do it" - everyone threw it back at us, and said we needed to base it on our own conditions and purposes. That is good, logical advice I would give any researcher who needs to define rural. Think about what is your objective in defining rural - what needs to be different enough about what you are looking at for it to be considered a separate category? It is not necessarily even an ordinal distinction, e.g. Large Urban, Small Urban, Suburban, Rural, Remote Rural, because the differences you may be looking for may be substantial, nonlinear, and non-monotonic.
If this is a question just out of curiosity, then do whatever the heck you want, of course.
