41,274 crashes in one year, and what the count can and cannot tell you.

In 2023, the latest year the Missouri State Highway Patrol has published, crash reports from St. Louis County and St. Louis City added up to 41,274 crashes. 27,720 of them happened in the county and 13,554 in the city. Together that is 30.2 percent of the 136,839 crashes the Patrol counted across Missouri, and 29.0 percent of the state's 34,820 personal injury crashes.

This page is the front door to the report's crash numbers. It explains what the counts are, what they are not, and why a reader who was hurt in one of those crashes might care. Three deeper pages follow the same rules: every number comes from a named table in the Patrol's Traffic Safety Compendium, every chart has a table with the same numbers under it, and nothing here rates, ranks, or compares clinics.

What the count is

Every number on these pages starts as a crash report written by a law enforcement agency and entered into MOCARS, the statewide crash record system the Patrol builds its compendium from. Table 1.13 sorts each county's crashes by severity. A fatal crash is one in which someone died. A personal injury crash is one in which someone was hurt and nobody died. Property damage only means the report recorded no injury. In the county's 2023 row, 92 plus 6,447 plus 21,181 equals 27,720, so each crash sits in exactly one of the three columns and is counted once.

St. Louis City has its own row because it is its own jurisdiction. The city is not part of St. Louis County, and the Patrol's tables keep them apart. This desk covers both, so it adds them together only where it says so, as in the combined line of the table above.

What the count is not

It is not a count of people. One injury crash can hurt one person or five. People are counted in other tables, and the municipality page uses one of them.

It is not every crash. A parking lot tap that nobody reported to police never reaches MOCARS, so it is in none of these numbers.

It is not a rate. The tables count crashes, not miles driven or residents, and this desk does not publish per-person rates without a population source on the page. The county covers far more ground than the city, so a larger count is not, by itself, a sign that its roads are worse.

It is not an exam. A crash filed as property damage only means no injury was written on that report, and the report is usually written at the scene, before anyone has been examined. Neck and back pain after a crash often shows up a day or more later. That is the subject of the 72-hour lag.

One difference worth noticing

In 2023, 26.9 percent of the city's crashes were personal injury crashes, against 23.3 percent in the county and 25.4 percent statewide. Put another way, a reported crash in the city was somewhat more likely to be filed as an injury crash. The table does not say why, and this desk will not guess; road types, speeds, and what gets reported can all move that share. What the table does say is that the injury crash is not a rare outcome anywhere on this map. Across the county and the city there were 10,094 of them in 2023, an average of 27.7 a day.

For the person who was in one

If you were hurt in a crash in St. Louis County or the city, you are one line in a very large table, and the table cannot tell you anything about your own neck, back, or head. What it can do is retire the idea that a crash has to be dramatic to matter. Most of these crashes never made the news. 31,039 of them were filed as property damage only, and the category on a report is decided before a clinician has seen anyone.

The useful move is the one this desk makes on every page. If something hurts after a crash, get examined this week and let the exam be written down with a date on it. If you have any of the emergency signs in the box below, go to an emergency room now.

Where the offices sit on this map

Missouri Injury Clinic, the clinic this desk is published for, has a South County office at 11144 Tesson Ferry Road, Suite 200, and a North County office at 14 Village Square Shop Ctr in Hazelwood. Hazelwood has its own row in the Patrol's municipality table: 749 crashes inside city limits in 2023, 209 of them injury crashes, with 310 people injured. The third office is in O'Fallon, in St. Charles County, outside the two rows this desk covers.

The clinic did not supply any of these numbers, and they say nothing about the clinic. They are here because two of its offices sit inside the area the numbers describe.

The three deeper pages