Why does Alaska have the most biking and walking commuters?

The percentage of commuters who walk(relative scale):

Follow this link to see the interactive graffic


I found the map shown above in Bike Retailer and Industry News.  What really surprised me is that Alaska has the highest percentage of walking commuters of any state.  Alaska also has a relatively high number of bike commuters, and the total of bike and walking commuters is also the highest of any state.  How can this be? Alaska is not mild weather, flat land, full of young granola eaters, so what is the reason?

Here are some more interesting graphics:
This one suggests there are health and enjoyment benefits that might result if more people can find a good way to add walking or bicycling as an option for getting to work:

The next graphic suggests that it is appropriate to put more funding toward facilitating bicycle and walking because of the level of use and the level of fatalities.  The "% of trips" part of the graph needs more detail, it represents the percent of commuter trips in the 51 largest cities, not counting public transportation.

“The NSC estimates that every crash fatality corresponds to $6.8 million in economic losses (a figure that incorporates both fatal and nonfatal crashes, and includes both property costs and losses of economic productivity)” source = http://daily.sightline.org/2012/01/20/a-new-low-for-car-crashes/

As I have stated in my post Do Bicycle Users Pay Their Fair Share?, bicycle and walking commuters actually subsidize motorized travel.  For may good economic and life style reasons it would be appropriate to spend a larger percentage of transportation money to facilitate walking and bicycle riding.

You are not stuck IN traffic, you ARE traffic

I found this image in Flickr

This billboard came to my attention while listening to The Gardens of Democracy on KUOW.  The speakers are Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer, speaking about thier book:  The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government

In the recorded talk, the authors give a very appealing idea of a different metaphor to use as a basis for conceptualizing how we view ourselves in relation to needs of the environment and society around us, and what our obligations for action might be.  Essentially they say that if we view the image of a garden and the understanding that a garden needs tending, this will be a much more useful metaphor than the more common one they call the mechanistic view, that the world and our society are like a machine that just needs getting started and then spins on dependent only on its internal perfection. 

The metaphors we use shape the way we think about solutions.  I like their garden metaphor.