Editorial: Mayor’s ‘traffic-calming’ is fine, but more cops and enforcement are crucial

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Mayor Tishaura O. Jones’ plan to invest in street redesign and other “traffic calming” measures for St. Louis isn’t an unreasonable start to address what at this point must be termed the crisis of traffic lawbreaking downtown and elsewhere. But infrastructure upgrades cannot be the whole equation. The ultimate and crucial solution really isn’t that complicated: More police officers visibly patrolling the streets and aggressive enforcement of the traffic laws already on the books.

The bill Jones signed last week approves more than $40 million to provide traffic circles, medians, bumped-out curbs and other infrastructure that has been shown to slow down drivers. The launch of the project happens to follow a recent spate of high-profile city traffic tragedies, including the maiming of a visiting teenage volleyball player who lost her legs to a downtown speeder last month, and the four young people killed in a hit-and-run crash just over a week later. Jones first proposed the bill last fall, after an earlier string of traffic casualties.

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In fact, such tragedies have been commonplace for several years now. As the Post-Dispatch’s Jacob Barker and Josh Renaud reported this week, last year’s 78 traffic fatalities on city streets was second only to the 2020 pandemic-year total of 81, based on data covering the past 20 years. It’s part of a rising trend of death that began almost a decade ago — and tracks behind a dramatic drop in traffic stops, from more than 85,000 in 2009 to just 45,000 in 2021.

There are multiple contributing factors to the lack of traffic enforcement, which anyone who drives downtown and in other neighborhoods has seen. Civil strife over police violence in recent years appears to correspond with the hands-off approach by police, which intensified during the pandemic. In 2018, then-Police Chief John Hayden instituted a deliberate shift in focus from traffic enforcement to addressing violent crime. Anyone who reasonably wonders why police can’t do both needs only to look at city police staffing levels, under which almost 90 officer positions are currently open, leaving a force of just 758 cops — more than 160 fewer than 2011 staffing levels.

While Jones has to some extent distanced herself from the discredited defund-the-police mindset of the progressive movement, her announcement of the added infrastructure funding wasn’t paired with a specific vow to beef up police staffing, which is what’s more immediately needed. Traffic-calming infrastructure is a long-term solution that won’t address the crisis at hand. Indeed, it’s unlikely the maiming of Janae Edmondson, the 17-year-old Tennessean, would have been prevented even if the infrastructure work had already been done, since it can’t realistically be done on every small side street.

What can and must be done is aggressive traffic enforcement — which in turn means hiring more officers and ordering them to end the hands-off approach to traffic scofflaws.

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