To the editor:

Five pedestrians died in St. Louis County over five weeks last fall. The county needs to take the lead on prioritizing safer streets. 

St. Louis County utilizes our taxes and our federal funds for road and sidewalk maintenance, in which safety is now a key award component. The outdated policies and guidance St. Louis County practices, however, prevent planning for tomorrow and designing and fixing these maintenance updates and streets to include safety enhancements.

We call on St. Louis County to adopt a strong, updated Complete Streets ordinance that requires St. Louis County Department of Transportation and metropolitan planning organization East West Gateway to consistently plan for all people who use the roads, including the most vulnerable users. We call on the county DOT to put safety and people first and utilize the tools and training they need to create transportation networks that serve all users.

We call on St. Louis County, which has an outdated transportation manual, to immediately adopt the best practices of the Federal Highways Administration and the National Association of City Transportation Officials to turn their vision into practice and implementation, not excuses and dismissiveness.

And we call on you to insist on safer streets from county elected and transportation officials, providing tangible safety enhancements for all users all transportation projects.

Our culture has been worn down to a hard callousness toward traffic violence. The loss of compassion to traffic death and injuries enable St. Louis County officials to show continued dismissiveness to tangible infrastructure change.

Please visit and follow “Safer Streets for Kirkwood and St. Louis County.” Providing your support on Facebook will help make safety changes.

Travel safe, on behalf of Safer Streets for Kirkwood and St. Louis County. 

Michael Carmody
Kirkwood