The difference for people who use public right-of-way outside of a vehicle.
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At the time of writing this blog post, the above video has 17K likes, 187 comments, hundreds of reposts, and thousands of shares. At first, it feels funny – charming even. Ah yes, the life of a Fairbanksan. Unique and wildly different. But this video also reveals challenges worth talking about.
Sidewalks and shared‑use paths continue to be secondary in winter maintenance decisions. This is not new. We’ve raised these concerns regularly through our Seasonal Mobility Task Force and Walk, Ride and Roll Advisory Committee, and even developed a Non‑Motorized Route Maintenance Prioritization schema (and a map!) to address them. Over time, it’s become clear that this isn’t about a lack of equipment or staff, but more about priority and understanding year‑round demand.
The result is highlighted clearly in this video: private/public maintenance inconsistency and poor/concerning access to sidewalks, push buttons, and curb ramps for much of the year due to snow and winter conditions. For people walking, rolling, using mobility devices, pushing strollers, or accessing transit, these conditions don’t just cause inconvenience, they remove options entirely. With conditions like these, people are forced into roadways, asked to detour, or discouraged from traveling at all.
Maintaining this network requires coordination among many community partners, including the City of Fairbanks, City of North Pole, Fairbanks North Star Borough, Road Service Areas, the State of Alaska, MACS Transit, Private Property Owners and more. What you see in this video is the cross-section of Private Property Owners mounding snow in a seemingly harmless section of their parking lot, with public ROW, where the City of Fairbanks is now responsible for it. This really isn’t the outcome of one bad storm or missed plow cycle – it highlights a systemic issue. When roadway/parking lot snow removal happens without equal attention to adjacent sidewalks, curb ramps, and crossings, we end up with streets/parking accommodations that look clear while access for non‑motorized users quietly disappears.
Operators and crews are not to blame. They’re working within the priorities they’re given. The larger issue is that walking and rolling are still treated as optional or recreational in winter, rather than as essential transportation. Yet we know better approaches exist. Other cold‑climate communities have implemented them. The question isn’t whether solutions are possible, but what we choose to prioritize, measure, and call “✅ done” after a snow event.
The comments on this reel reinforce what many Fairbanksans already experience: sidewalks and crossings aren’t prioritized for public use in winter, but rather for plowing efficiency and roadway operations. The result is infrastructure that exists on paper but disappears in practice.
Many of the comments also reveal a tendency to romanticize these conditions as simply “how Fairbanks is.” While resilience is part of our local culture, framing inaccessible infrastructure as charm or toughness can obscure the very real inequities at play. When difficulty is normalized, especially in ways that affect all of the users we’ve already named, it becomes easier to accept exclusion as inevitable rather than something we have the ability to change.
Fairbanks is unique, and that should inspire us to build winter systems that work for everyone, not just those behind the wheel.
If this resonates with you, stay engaged. Share your experiences, attend a committee meeting, or reach out to local maintenance authorities, private property owners and elected officials. Progress depends on hearing from the people most affected (we can’t say this enough) and making winter access a shared priority.
Thanks for coming to our Ted Talk!