Kansas Has 4 Of 10 Most ‘Middle Of Nowhere’ Towns In U.S., Says Big East Coast Paper

Sam Zeff:

This is just not the kind of news Kansans want to hear, but: Four of the ten most isolated towns in all of the United States are in Kansas.

The Washington Post, using data from something called the Malaria Atlas Project, wanted to know what the middle of nowhere looks like. A 22-member team from Oxford’s Big Data Institute spent years building a global map showing how long it takes to get anywhere on Earth based on roads, elevation and a lot of other things.

The Post scraped the data because (this is such an East Coast thing) it wanted to find the spot in the United States that “best represents the middle of nowhere.” Hint: none of the places it found is on Eastern Time.

The Post used simple criteria: “towns that are farthest from any metro with more than 75,000 people, ranked by travel time in hours.”