Cyclist deaths in St. Louis County went from zero to two in one year. Pedestrian crashes and injuries both climbed. And the Chesterfield road where MoDOT tore out its own safety infrastructure last year still has a crash rate double the statewide average for similar roadways, according to MoDOT's own data.

That's the picture in Trailnet's "State of Our Streets" report, released Monday. The nonprofit's annual crash analysis identifies Lindbergh Boulevard as the county's deadliest corridor for people walking and biking: 22 crashes in 2025 resulting in 19 injuries and one fatality, according to FOX 2's coverage of the release.

For Chesterfield residents, the report lands with particular weight. It cites the Clarkson Road bumpout removal as a cautionary example of traffic-calming infrastructure reversed under community pressure, alongside a scrapped roundabout in South County and downtown St. Louis bumpout removals.

How Clarkson Road lost its bumpouts

MoDOT installed curb bumpout islands on Clarkson Road and Long Road in fall 2024 as part of a $52 million regional Safety Improvements Project covering 230 locations across three counties. The agency chose those corridors based on 2016–2020 crash data: Clarkson Road saw 600 crashes in that span, six of them fatal or serious. Long Road logged 272 crashes with six fatal or serious.

But MoDOT never told Chesterfield's city government, local police, or fire services the bumpouts were coming. Residents pushed back hard. State Rep. Ben Keathley, R-Chesterfield, introduced HB 665 to give communities formal authority to reject MoDOT traffic-calming projects and held a hearing in February 2025.

By March 2025, MoDOT reversed course. Tom Blair, the agency's St. Louis district engineer, acknowledged the failure directly in a press release: "We did not involve the public and stakeholders while developing improvements for Clarkson and Long roads. That was a misstep on our part."

Chesterfield City Administrator Mike Geisel was blunt, telling KMOV that the city council "doesn't believe that these particular traffic calming tools are appropriate on those roadways."

The bumpouts came out by early summer 2025. MoDOT committed at the time to holding a community listening session on Clarkson Road's safety within a year. No date for that session has been publicly announced.

County crash trends: fewer pedestrian deaths, more cyclist fatalities

The Trailnet report documents a troubling split in the county's safety trends. Pedestrian fatalities declined in 2025, but pedestrian crashes and injuries both rose. In the city, cyclist deaths rose to three after two consecutive years at zero.

The geography is stark. In the county, 78 percent of pedestrian fatalities and all cyclist fatalities occurred on arterial roads. Nearly all pedestrian fatalities happened on roads posted between 35 and 45 mph. Failure to yield remains the leading factor in crashes involving cyclists.

Trailnet CEO Cindy Mense framed the tension between safety infrastructure and community resistance in an interview with St. Louis Magazine. "Maybe that one bumpout is annoying to you, but that, in conjunction with a no-right-on-red signal, combined with a lower speed limit, they all work together to slow folks down," she said. "I hope that folks, when they see their streets changing, they see that we're trying to make it safer for everyone."

What comes next for Clarkson Road

The corridor remains unresolved. The bumpouts are gone, and the promised listening session hasn't materialized publicly. Keathley's HB 665, backed by Wildwood and Clarkson Valley, would give municipalities veto power over future MoDOT safety installations on state routes through their jurisdictions.

MoDOT and the East-West Gateway Council of Governments published their "Blueprint for Arterials" in June 2024, a regional framework that calls for incorporating pedestrian and cyclist safety into arterial road design, including protected crossings and traffic calming. Blair signed that document months before acknowledging MoDOT's public-engagement failure on Clarkson Road.

In the county alone, 95 projects with bicycle or pedestrian improvements received federal funding in 2025. The city and county now share 724 miles of bike-friendly infrastructure, 155 of those miles running alongside streets as dedicated lanes or protected paths rather than off-street trails. Whether any of that investment reaches Clarkson Road depends on a conversation that, more than a year after MoDOT promised it, has yet to be scheduled.