St. Louis County Saw Its Highest Ever Number of Pedestrian Deaths in 2023

By Andrea Arnold On Apr 11, 2024

More pedestrians were killed in St. Louis County in 2023 than any previous year, even as the number of pedestrian deaths in the City of St. Louis dropped to its lowest level in five years.

That’s according to the 2023 Crash Report released yesterday by Trailnet, the local nonprofit that advocates for pedestrians and cyclists. The report offers an annual look at how the region is affected by traffic violence.

This year, some of the news is actually good … or, at least, better.

“In 2023, the City of St. Louis had its lowest number of total traffic fatalities since 2018,” Trailnet reports. “For the first time since 2014, there were fewer than 10 pedestrian fatalities in the City.” Eight people were killed. However, the report says, the number of overall crashes in the city increased slightly, and there were still an alarming number of people in the city injured by cars while walking (225) and biking (49).

The county’s trends are even more troubling. In addition to notching a record-setting 28 pedestrian deaths last year, Trailnet writes that the total number of crashes involving pedestrians was also up significantly — the 291 in St. Louis County made 2023 the second most dangerous year on record after 2016. Also, “Crashes involving people biking jumped to over 100 total bicycle crashes, the highest in five years, and a stark increase from the previous three years. Combined pedestrian and bicycle crashes reached a total of 395, the second highest total in 15 years.”

Trailnet notes that, as in past years, pedestrian crashes in both city and county were disproportionately located in Black and brown neighborhoods. That’s something that mirrors national trends; as Angie Schmitt has detailed in her seminal book Right of Way: Race, Class and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America, the typical victim in a pedestrian fatality isn’t a wealthy urbanite looking at their phone, but rather a working-class person trying to cross a busy road to get to the bus in a part of town with subpar sidewalks and crosswalks.

To that end, Trailnet’s report breaks down where the most crashes occurred in both city and county (unsurprisingly, Grand Boulevard figures prominently in the city, and Halls Ferry/New Halls Ferry Road is the most dangerous road in the county). It also calls for policy changes to get fatalities to drop.

“We need a built environment that caters to humans, not cars,” Trailnet concludes. “We need to better educate new drivers. We need to find an equitable, safe and affordable way to enforce traffic laws. We need up-to-date local and state policies that support Complete Streets, Vision Zero and more.”

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