1) McDonnell Blvd between Campus Parkway and Lindbergh. There are pieces of sidewalk, some of which are in bad repair. You simply cannot walk the length of Mcdonnell Blvd.

2) Dunn Rd at Brown Rd or Utz. Bus stops are on the shoulder of of the road, no sidewalk connections.

3) Lindbergh Blvd at Page. Bus stops near the center of a cloverleaf?

I think a lot of the issue, beyond design, is attitude. In the two short weeks I’ve spent here in Hamtramck, I keep finding myself amazed…. By my St. Louis training I just automatically wait for cars to go first at the intersections every time, but here they usually wave to let *you* cross. When I’m driving, I find that people on foot seem to expect that I’ll let them go first (which of course I do), even if they are crossing against traffic in the middle of the street. When I lived in Chicago, well…. The drivers there were aggressive, but they were used to bold pedestrians and to having to react to pedestrians. Not that every St. Louis driver is anti-pedestrian, and it’s not LA bad…. But my experience was that a good many StL drivers expected the right of way in their cars, whether they had it or not.

More on the design side of the issue: One of the first things anyone said to me when I was learning to drive in St. Louis was, “When you’re in North City, make sure you avoid the outermost lane–that’s the sidewalk here.” It was true, too–I walked in the road all the time there, due to the intermittent nature or outright lack of sidewalks. The city touts its 50 50 program, which will split the cost of sidewalk maintenance with you, but in low income communities that have been severely neglected by the city itself for decades, that model just doesn’t work. There’s got to be a way for the Near North Side to get the maintenance the city has been denying it for dozens of years, other than giving Paul McKee $400 mil outta the general fund. Not confident that’ll happen with the current city gov, or even that the big McKee bailout will net tangible improvements any time soon for N StL, but I do know that were I still in town I’d still be walking in the gutter.

1) Walking from the Brentwood Metrolink station to Dierbergs and points west. I have heard the story of how the stores wanted to discourage Metrolink users from parking in their lot. But this situation is just ridiculous. You are forced to walk a quarter mile just to reach a point opposite of the fence where you got off the train. And of course, there is no sidewalk. You are just walking in the traffic.

2) Clayton Road at Lindbergh. Getting to the bus shelter on Clayton Road is a joke. Requires a hike through grass or mud and down a somewhat steep grade. The joke is that someone is almost always at this shelter waiting for the bus.

3) Dorsett Road crossing under I-270. People get off the bus on the east side of I-270 and walk under the bridge in an extremely dangerous situation to reach jobs at the restaurants on the west side. There is no sidewalk, and anyone could be killed trying to make this crossing. At least a new intersection is planned here. I think there will be a sidewalk in the middle of it.