There usually aren't any meaningful destinations (like shops / a park / a mall) within a suburb you can reach in a reasonable amount of time, except a friend if the live close.
American suburbs feature poorly interconnected residential-only areas that sprawl endlessly. You can easily be a ten minute walk from a friend (through yards and across fences, not over a walking path) but a ten or fifteen minute drive away due to the Byzantine road layout.
Commercial zones that have groceries, restaurants, shops, and entertainment are almost always several kilometers away. You could technically bike there, but there are rarely bike lanes. And due to serving the needs of a large, low-density area, you’d have to bike on multi-lane high-speed thoroughfares which is far less safe than being able to use small local streets. Where there are sidewalks, they often end abruptly and don’t actually connect to anywhere or anything.
Not OP, but I think SimCity 2000 has a certain charm to it, but if I had to pick my favorite from the series, I'd say SimCity 4 is the way to go. It's available on GOG.
I live in a very suburban neighborhood in Arizona and we have 2 neighborhood parks within a 2-3 minute walk. There are 2-3 more parks in the 5-10 minute range.
There is a 10 minute walk to 3 grocery stores, a bar, many fast food restaurants, tons of medical offices, etc.
All of my friends and family who live in different suburbs have similar amounts of services with a short walk as well.
That's hardly universal. I recently moved from inside the city of Buffalo, NY to a suburb of Albany, NY. I'm now significantly closer to non-gas-station shops than I was in the city. There are a lot of very poorly planned cities in the US, many suburbs are newer & much less car-centric despite being lower density.
