Scientific American

Nowhere becomes notable

Scientific American has called out “Badger, Alaska” as the country’s least “walkable city.”

If you’re living there and in poor health because you don’t get any exercise, blame the city.

“Your daily steps may depend on your zip code more than your willpower,” according to the magazine. “Researchers found that walkable city design – not personal motivation – was the key factor behind people taking 1,100 more steps per day.”

Welcome to the 21st Century, where good, old-fashioned American laziness isn’t your problem. It’s the fault of a system that let you decide where you wanted to live. But who exactly do you blame if you live in Badger?

This question has to be asked because most Alaskans reading this story are wondering “Where the hell is Badger?”

One of them, when asked for directions to the city said that this all “sounds like a story written with the assistance of an AI hallucination.”

But it’s not.

Badger exists

And it’s big. Wikipedia calls it the fifth-largest community in the 49th state.

Still struggling to locate Badger?

How about an Iditarod-season clue?  The kennels of famed Iditarod Sled Dog Race champ Rick Swenson, a five-time Iditarod winner, are just to the northeast and the Tanana River is just to the southwest.

Most Alaskans should, by now, have narrowed the hunt to somewhere in the Fairbanks area, but if that hasn’t gotten you any closer to identifying Badger, don’t feel bad. Most Fairbanksans queried on this subject had never heard of a”city” named Badger, either.

But good, old Wikipedia knew where it was.

Badger, it says, “is a census-designated place (CDP) in the Fairbanks North Star Borough of Alaska. It was one of the CDPs created in 2010 out of small suburbs and outskirts (sic) of Fairbanks.”

Strangely enough, Badger was created four years after the Fairbanks North Star Borough School Board decided to remove the Badger name from the local elementary school because its ugly, local history.

The school had been named Badger Road Elementary because of its location along Badger Road. But it was pointed out to the Board that connecting the school to a road named after the late Harry Badger, a local farmer and pedophile who in 1916 pleaded guilty to raping a 10-year-old girl probably wasn’t a good thing.

“North Star Borough Board of Education member and attorney Mike O’Brien brought the Badger name’s connection to the admitted pedophile back into local public consciousness this summer, and local debate led up to the school board’s consideration of a renaming measure,” Dan Bross of Fairbanks KUAC reported at that time.

Maybe that’s why some folks left.

“The population of the CDP was 19,031 as of the 2020 Census, down from 19,482 in 2010. Badger’s designation as a place made it number five by population, behind Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau and Knik-Fairview, in a list of Alaska Cities and census-designated places (by population),” according to Wikipedia.

Now, if you’re thinking Knik-Fairview is in any way a part of the Municipality of Anchorage – Fairview being, after all, one of the original four neighborhoods that formed the city – think again.

Knik-Fairview is more Knik than Fairview. And it is, like Badger, CDP that materialized seeminlgy out of nowhere. It basically parallels Knik Arm from the Palmer Hayflats along the Glenn Highway west to Cottonwood Creek on the Knik-Goose Bay Road.

This CDP appears to named for the Fairview Loop Road more than Knik, long the home of the late Joe Redington, the father of the Iditarod. And to further confuse things, the state abandons Knik altogher in its designation and calls this area the “Fairview Census Tract.”

Go figure.

What can be said is that it is about as much a “city” as Badger is a city.

New York, New York….

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a city as “an inhabited place of greater size, population, or importance than a town or village. Badger and Knik-Fairview wouldn’t even seem to qualify for the latter designations.

To be a town, there really has to be a definable “town square” or “town center” of some type, even if it’s just a cluster of businesses, and every village has a “village green.” Or at least they once did.

Badger and Knik-Fairview are comprised of houses scattered in the woods. Both places have more woods and trails than sidewalks. And when you live in a place like that, it’s usually easy to go for a walk if you can pry yourself away from the television and manage to lift your rear end off the sofa.

So what’s with these walkability conclusions?

Scientific American drew them from a 2025 study by the University of Washington in Seattle, which tracked people’s cell phones to see how much they were walking and then compared the times they spent walking in different cities or, in the case of Baxter, non-cities.

“During the observation period, 5,424 participants relocated 7,447 times between 1,609 US cities,” according to the study published in Nature. “The physical activity levels of participants were tracked through smartphone accelerometry over several months before and after relocation, creating a countrywide study of 7,447 quasi-experiments.”

The study does not say exactly how many people from Badger were tracked, but the lines on a map connecting the cities the study participants visited makes the sample size for Badger look very, very small, and small sample sizes make the conclusion of any study suspect.

Which is not to say that the researchers aren’t on to something as regards walkability. Walking is good for public health. Americans do way too little of it, and some cities do, by design, encourage a lot more walking than others.

Anchorage is not one of those cities. It is pretty much the opposite. It is a city where many sidewalks are rendered near useless by traffic flying immediately alongside them at 40, 45, 50 mph or more. Many people find such sidewalks scary to walk on.

Add in the city’s ever-rising pedestrian fatality rate, and it becomes little wonder why so few are using those sidewalks now,, which is not good because in the shockingly sedentary America of today, anything that gets people moving will make them healthier.

Why? Because exercise is medicine.

Walkability’s importance

If you were, for instance, one of the many Americans with high blood pressure or various other so-called comorbidities linked to most Covid-19 deaths during the recent pandemic, one of the most effective things you could do to protect yourself was get fit.

Those who were fit “had substantially lower need for hospital admissions and intubation (that’s where they poke a hole in your throat and stick a tube in it to force air into your lungs so you can breathe,” researchers reported in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings. “Similar patterns were observed for elderly patients and subgroups with comorbidities including hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and chronic kidney disease; for each of these conditions, those in the High-Fit category had mortality rates that were roughly half those in the Low-Fit category.” 

And the latest news on the exercise is medicine front came just days ago when JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, reported that physical activity isn’t just protective against cancer; it also helps in the treatment of cancer.

Researchers studying cancer survivors found that “higher levels of moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) after a cancer diagnosis were associated with lower risk of cancer mortality among people previously diagnosed with seven cancers not commonly studied for their association with MVPA. Findings suggest that it is important for health care professionals to promote physical activity for longevity and overall health among people living with and beyond cancer.

“The role of physical activity (PA) in mitigating cancer risk is well recognized, and the understanding of this association has led to clear PA recommendations for cancer prevention,” those researchers added. “Similarly, people with a history of cancer are recommended to accumulate 150 to 300 minutes of moderate intensity or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous intensity aerobic PA per week. However, these recommendations are largely based on research of mortality outcomes within breast, prostate, or colon cancer survivors.”

Bladder, endometrial, kidney, lung, oral cavity, ovarian and rectal cancers can now be added to those cancers as diseases that physical activity helps to treat. Not to mention physical activity’s protection against cardiovascular disease (CVD), long the country’s biggest killer.

The latest research estimates that “that approximately 75 percent of CVD deaths could be prevented by appropriate lifestyle changes, particularly through increasing levels of physical activity. Physical inactivity is the fourth leading cause of death according to the World Health Organization.” 

So no matter where you live, it might be a good idea to go for a daily walk, and if you live in Badger, or for that matter, Knik-Fairview, it should be easy enough to find a place for a walk in the woods, and all indications are that walk in the woods can be healthier than walking in any city.

Editor’s note: This story was updated on Feb. 21, 2026 to include some information on the ugly history behind the Badger name.