> In what place is this 30 minute drive from a rural area to the urban center an actual thing?
Where is it not a thing around any major centre? Every city is ultimately going to have rural area outside of it. I suppose you can find some city that has poor geography or ridiculous suburban sprawl that impede access. There are always outliers. But in general?
Of course there are also rural areas further away, and maybe if you were trying to work in some kind of local industry (mining, agriculture, etc.) you'd need to be further away, but since we're just talking about WFH...
> There's not some abundance of rural areas
How many do you need, exactly?
Something I've noticed from living most of my life in rural areas but part of it in cities is that urbanites have very strange ideas of what rural life is like (at least in the US). Rural people usually have some idea of city life because they lived in a city for some time, perhaps while at college or pursuing a career in their youth before moving back to the country. But urbanites often have no personal experience of rural life at all, so their notions come from entertainment media created by other urbanites. They end up with a weird caricature that has more in common with Deliverance than it does reality.
I used to try to educate them, but then I realized that would just encourage them to move to the country, so I stopped.