On the final Saturday of 2024, I took a bus to Ted Drewes Frozen Custard on Chippewa Street in the St. Louis Hills neighborhood. But I wasn’t going there, as I had hundreds of times before, to relish its famous concretes or sundaes.
This stretch of Chippewa, part of the historic Route 66 that enshrines an image of fast-paced freedom through automobility, is a current flash point in the negotiations between the public — many of whom do not own cars and rely on public transit, biking, and walking —and the powers who control how our streets are designed.
I stepped off the #11 Metrobus at Watson Road as the sky darkened and walked another four blocks on the south side of historic Route 66. It was unnerving and typical. On the way, I traversed five unmarked crosswalks, two of them slip-lanes that allow drivers to turn while maintaining high speeds, and twelve driveway entrances to parking lots attached to an auto shop, fast food chains, drive-through coffee chains, banks, doctors’ offices, and other varieties of business, keeping my head swiveling as drivers sped by, or waited for their chance to…