Cars, even used ones, are out of the price range of many people living in Bethel, and even if you buy one, gas currently costs $6 a gallon.

Instead, just about everyone in town depends on taxis or their own two feet to get around. There are about 70 taxi drivers in Bethel, one for every 85 people, making it the city in America with the most taxis per capita.

“In one sense, our cabs are our public transit,” Leif Albertson, the vice-mayor, told me.

But a surfeit of taxis does not mean that transportation is affordable, either. A ride in town costs $5 per person, no matter how short the trip. A ride to the airport, or to the suburbs, costs $7. A stop en-route costs $1, plus $1 per minute after three minutes. That starts to add up in a town where 23 percent of the population is below the poverty line.

Dozens of people walk in the ditches alongside Bethel’s one paved road, dragging their feet in the dust. But the town isn’t particularly walkable either. Bethel’s newspaper is constantly posting stories of people who have been hit by cars. Janz told me he tries to walk to his job as a lawyer year-round, which means wearing cleats in the winter ice, and dealing with dusty pants in the summer.

I talked to one man in his mid-fifties named Nelson who was in town for medical treatment. He carried a cane, and said he walks everywhere to save money, even though he has a bad hip. He regularly walks the four miles out to a region called Tundra Ridge. He said that even the bus in Bethel, which costs $3 a ride, was too expensive for him (seniors pay only $1).

“Once I get going, it doesn’t hurt,” he told me, about his hip.

According to Census data, 1,500 people commute to work in Bethel by driving alone in a car, truck, or van. Five people take public transit, 740 carpool, and 3,615 commute by another travel mode. For Bethel residents that means walking or cabs.

Frances Reichs, who hosts a weekly radio call-in show in Bethel and is an unofficial town historian, moved here in 1975. Most people were relegated to walking then, he told me, because there were only three cabs. Then two brothers moved to town from Nome, and, taking notice growing number of jobs in the town’s government sector and the affluent residents that came with them, they decided to start a cab company. It’s now called Kusko Cab (many government jobs come with a hefty cost-of-living adjustment that doubles as hazard pay because Bethel is such an isolated place).

The cab companies also diversified Bethel. Looking for employees who had clean driving records and the capital to lease a taxi, companies started to recruit family and friends from overseas. Kusko is now known around town as the “Albanian” cab company because it employs mostly drivers from Albania and Macedonia. The other three cab companies employ mostly Koreans.