Rural Carpool: Defining Rural

	“. . . from hamlet to village to town to city -- and then back home again.”
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Defining the "Rural" in RuralCarpool.com

Rural Carpool currently aims to help Drivers in smaller rural communities (those living in Hamlets, Villages, and small Towns) self-organize to share long roundtrips to the larger Towns, Cities, and Metros, to which they already travel periodically, often alone.

Rural Carpool is not yet optimized -- or even appropriately designed -- for commuters, or to deal with the needs of Carpool transit within a large town or city, nor is it optimized -- though possibly serviceable -- for people traveling from Urban to Rural communities. That will depend mostly on the frequency and number of urban Drivers going to the same region of smaller communities.

The table below outlines the (admittedly porous) definitional boundaries.

Rural	Hamlets	pop. < 300	Often just "named crossroads," or a micro-region, or where a village once was. May have a church, a community hall, a storefront or two.	From
	Villages	pop. 500	May have an everything-grocery-gas station, a business or two, a local cafe	From
	Tiny Towns	pop. 800	A grocery store, gas station, local businesses, a couple of restaurants	From
Rural-Urban	Small Towns	pop. 1,000+	A grocery store, gas station, drug store, bank, hardware store, restaurants	From/To
Rural-Urban	Towns	pop. 5,000+	Lawyers/doctors/dentist offices, gas stations, strip malls, drug stores, banks, hardware stores, restaurants	To/From
Urban	Cities	pop. 10,000+	enclosed mall(s), specialty stores, coffee shops, movie theatres, taxis, buses	To
Urban	Metros	pop. 250,000+	Airport, bus/tram/subways, megamalls, concerts/theatre	To
These are very general ranges, and there are many exceptions to the above. That's why every Hub has local humans crafting the Hub's regional boundaries, and choosing what target towns and cities make the most sense to include.