STLPR0%
Trailnet’s report shows St. Louis communities of color are impacted the most by traffic violence 20%
By Andrea Y. Henderson0%
6/26/2026, 10:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 24 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Representativeness Heuristic, and Framing Effect, with Ambiguity (Equivocation) as the most egregious example at 34.3% saturation with 192 hits. Analysis detected 1,363 faulty-reasoning hits from 559 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 34.1% and a BS Rank of 20% (17,139 of 21,182 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 80.90% of the article peer group.
Traffic violence disproportionately impacts people of color and low-income households in the St.
Louis region, according to a new street safety report.
Trailnet, a local nonprofit that advocates for safer streets, released its first State of Our Streets report this week.
It highlights recent local and state projects that are improving civic infrastructure for pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders.
It also recommends ways to enhance roadways for communities of color and low-income households and encourage equitable transportation routes for those more vulnerable to traffic violence.
Officials are continually making strides to improve street conditions and the area’s transportation system; however, many St.
Louisans experience multiple inequities when commuting or moving through the area, said Erich Hellmer, lead author of Trailnet’s State of Our Streets report.
“We see with census data those communities that have high public transit needs and have low levels of vehicle access are also predominantly communities of color, and those are communities that have seen a lot of disinvestment,” Hellmer said.
“We have seen disinvestment in our entire road system.”
The report outlines that decades of disinvestment and inequitable infrastructure funding mechanisms have failed vulnerable road users, residents who heavily rely on public transportation or walk, bike or roll to destinations where the streets and roads are not designed for their needs.
Researchers used 2024 U.S. census data to identify census tracts near areas with the highest rates of crashes involving vulnerable road users.
They found an overlap in data that showed that crash sites involving vulnerable road users have higher percentages of Black and brown residents, higher percentages of commuters utilizing public transit, lower median household incomes and a higher percentage of unemployed residents and those without access to a vehicle, compared to predominantly white census tracts.
“If you look at the top five census tracts with the highest density of vulnerable road user crashes, and you compare that to the average of all census tracts, those census tracts are 3.6 times more likely for a household to have no vehicle access and nine times more likely that a household uses public transportation to get to work.
“These are areas of the city where people need to walk, catch the bus or the Metrolink, or they need to ride a bike, and they are exposed to roads that are not designed for them to safely do that,” Hellmer said.
Trailnet recommends that St.
Louis prioritize traffic-calming measures that encourage walking and biking; design streets specifically engineered for cyclists and connect them to the broader community safely, continue pushing for lower speed limits on local roads and arterial streets and approach sidewalk maintenance equitably.
The report emphasizes that St.
Louis County should advocate for federal transportation funding to push forward more bicycle and pedestrian safety projects.
“We have a systems problem, and we have started to develop tools to address that in a systemic way, and we've started to apply those tools,” Hellmer said.
“We still see the problems concentrated in specific places.
… We want to focus on helping the people that need it the most, and by that I mean looking at the data and saying ‘We know where these problems are happening, we know what patterns are behind them, so let's fix them, but let's fix them everywhere.’”
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97%flagged-word coverageErich Hellmer
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