So for me it’s:
Rural - I grew up in small village in the countryside in the UK South of Oxford.
Urban - I went to university in Manchester (big former industrial city in North of England) and then worked in London
Suburban - lived Reno Nevada and San Francisco bay suburbs when I moved to the States
Urban - lived in San Francisco proper for 15+ years
Suburban - have lived in two different DC suburbs since 2019
I would say what rural (and suburban and urban for that matter) means very different things in the UK vs US. We go to the village I grew up in most summers, as well as miles of footpaths in the English countryside working walking distance, there is a shop and a coupe of pubs (used to be a lot more 
). In the American countryside you are very unlikely to have that, almost certainly even to grab a pint or get a loaf of bread you are going to have to drive, you are even unlikely to have hiking trails within walking distance, you may be surrounded by beautiful countryside but you’ll likely only see it from a car.
Whew. Today I was laughing at myself because I was annoyed that it took 7 mins to go “across town” to take my niece to Target (2.5 miles) and we were only in the store for 10 mins.
I’ve stayed out in the country in North Carolina with my friend before. I remember how we had to plan our trips like that. When she went to work my whole day would be stay at the farm OR go into town.
To be honest I plan the same way here in the suburbs but my plans revolve around whether I am going 10 minutes east or 10 minutes west.
45 mins to town… I could never! 
But I’m sure your skin would crawl at the suburban-ness of here!
I went from:
- Rural (or at least semi-rural) North Carolina during my childhood.
- Urban Raleigh, NC during college and grad school.
- Now a suburb of Sacramento, CA.
Admittedly Raleigh isn’t a huge city, but it was urban enough that it was my first experience having to deal with things like homeless people. And it was urban enough for there to be a bus stop right across the street from my apartment where I could hop on the bus and be on campus in 10 minutes.
And that’s something I definitely don’t miss about living in a rural part of the US – having absolutely nothing you can walk to, and having to drive everywhere. Even in the suburban neighborhood I live in now there are a few stores and restaurants I can walk to.
I grew up in a suburb of Hartford, CT, but when my wife and I go back to visit there she calls it rural. The house I grew up in backed onto a large empty field (now built up with new houses) and there were working farms in my town. Still, that’s what I grew up thinking of as suburbia.
Then I went off to college in several cities: Pittsburgh, Boston, and Chicago. I liked the vibe of living and studying in a city, particularly Boston. But Boston was small enough I could walk most places I wanted to go.
When we got married we went back to Boston, then to New York. Though I work on Long Island, we started out living in the city. It was Queens, not Manhattan, but NYC has an energy and intensity I hadn’t really felt anywhere else. I found it hard to take, frankly. So I was happy when, after a couple of years, we moved out to the Island. Then I was back in suburbia, but a very different sort of suburbia from where I grew up. If my home town verged on being rural, Long Island, particularly Nassau County, next to the city, verges on being urban. This I feel comfortable with: I don’t have to deal with the intensity of NYC, but we have many of the conveniences of a small city, including easy access to shopping and great restaurants (much within walking distance).
So you could say I started in a near-rural environment, spent several years in urban settings, and finally settled in a near-urban suburbia, where I’ve found myself the most comfortable.
Yeah though I still might have been tempted to move somewhere more rural (I grew up in the country and now I have kids it’s not like we are out on the town every night) except for the fact it’s not just shops and restaurants, the countryside is not very accessible in the American Countryside. Very few places I’ve been in the states out in the countryside have had extensive trails within walking distance.
That’s particularly true around where I live right now, my suburb of DC has a good mix of trails and downtown areas within walking distance, but out in the countryside east of DC towards Annapolis where my inlaws live there is loads of beautiful countryside but you can only see it from your car.