Ask anyone who tracks these things and they'll tell you St. Matthews carries the highest Walk Score of any city in Kentucky, a 50 out of 100, ahead of Covington and Paducah and well clear of Louisville's citywide average in the low 30s. It's the kind of stat that gets repeated at open houses and in neighborhood Facebook groups until it starts to feel like a permanent fact about the place, the same way people say the mall used to have a chess set the size of a card table or that the old donut sign on Shelbyville Road has outlasted three different restaurants.
But a citywide score is an average, and averages hide the worst blocks as easily as they flatter the best ones. For more than a decade, one of St. Matthews' busiest connector streets had a sidewalk on one side only, and in stretches, nothing at all. That street is finally catching up to its own city's reputation this year, and the story of why it took so long says more about how St. Matthews actually functions than the Walk Score ever will.
A Ranking Built on Somebody Else's Best Block
The pedestrian-friendly reputation is real. Pockets like Beechwood Village carry the kind of density, small storefronts, and short blocks that make a 50 possible in the first place. If you live near Westport Road and Ridgeway Avenue, you're sitting on a Walk Score in the high 70s, genuinely very walkable, most errands on foot. Nextdoor's own resident survey backs this up from the inside: St. Matthews neighbors rank walking, dog ownership, and gardening among their top shared interests, and residents consistently cite walkability itself as one of the top reasons they like living here.
Move half a mile in the wrong direction, though, and the number drops hard. A location on South Hubbards Lane, still inside St. Matthews, scores a 39, car-dependent territory where most errands require driving. The gap between a 79 at one intersection and a 39 a few blocks away is the real story the single citywide average is built to smooth over. Chenoweth Lane sat on the wrong side of that gap for years, and everybody who drove or walked it knew it.
The Half-Mile That Never Got a Sidewalk
Chenoweth Lane runs between two of the busiest roads in the area, U.S. 60 (Shelbyville Road) to the south and U.S. 42 (Brownsboro Road) to the north, cutting straight through the middle of St. Matthews. It's the kind of connector street that residents use constantly without thinking about it much, until they're the one pushing a stroller or walking a dog along a shoulder with no sidewalk at all.
Back in 2015, the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet studied the corridor and graded it a "D" on its own Bicycle Comfort Index. The agency's presentation at the time described sidewalks that were narrow, broken, or simply missing, and not consistently accessible under ADA standards. That's not a subjective complaint from a resident with a grudge. That's the state's own assessment of a street inside the "most walkable city in Kentucky."
The state's proposed fix back then was to widen Chenoweth to three full lanes with a continuous center turn lane, a plan that would have added car capacity while doing comparatively little for anyone on foot. Residents organized against it, forming a group specifically to oppose the widening, and turned out to public meetings to push for a different set of priorities: narrower streets, real crosswalks, and a corridor people could cross without treating it like a thruway. The traffic numbers actually supported them. KYTC's own count showed volume on the street declining over the prior 25 years, from roughly 13,000 vehicles a day down to under 12,000, undercutting the case for more car lanes in the first place.
The compromise that residents wanted in 2015 sat unbuilt for a decade.
What Actually Broke Ground This Year
In January 2026, it finally moved. A $5.6 million KYTC project, officially KY 1932 (Chenoweth Lane) Improvement Design, Project 05-531, started construction the week of January 20. The scope split the difference the 2015 meetings had argued for: a center turning lane from Massie Avenue south to the railroad crossing, paired with a genuinely new sidewalk running the length of the west side of Chenoweth, from that same railroad crossing north to Brownsboro Road.
That's not a repave. That's a sidewalk where one flat out did not reliably exist, connecting a stretch of the corridor that had been a documented gap since at least the 2015 study. The city's own project page, last updated in June, targeted August 31 for completion, while KYTC's public messaging described the finish more loosely as "this fall." Both of those windows have effectively closed or are closing as you read this in September, which means the sidewalk on Chenoweth should already be on the ground, or close enough to it that walking the corridor is the fastest way to check, closing a gap that outlasted a Facebook opposition group, multiple public meetings, and roughly ten years of residents driving past a street their own city was already calling walkable.
The Study That's Mapping the Rest of the Gaps
Chenoweth got fixed because a decade-old fight over widening happened to end in the right compromise. It wasn't the product of a systematic citywide plan, and that's exactly the gap the City of St. Matthews is now trying to close with its own Walkability Study.
The city held an open house on March 3 at The Arterburn, the St. Matthews Community Center, built specifically to identify sidewalk gaps, difficult crossings, and missing connections between neighborhoods and destinations like parks and schools. Residents who couldn't attend in person were routed to an online survey and interactive map, letting anyone flag a specific corner or stretch of street where the walk from home to a park or a school corridor breaks down.
That's a meaningfully different approach than what produced the Chenoweth fix. Instead of waiting for a controversial widening proposal to force the issue, the city is asking residents directly where the next Chenoweth-style gap is hiding, before it takes ten years and a resident advocacy group to surface it. Whether that translates into a funded pipeline of projects the way Chenoweth eventually got funded is still an open question. The study identifies problems. It doesn't come with its own $5.6 million.
Why This Matters If You Actually Live Here
If your daily walk touches Chenoweth between the tracks and Brownsboro Road, you're getting a stretch of sidewalk that simply was not there before, one that finally lines up with the parks the corridor is supposed to connect to, including Brown Park and St. Matthews Community Park nearby. If your daily walk doesn't touch Chenoweth, the more useful takeaway is that the city just proved it will act on a specific, mapped gap when the funding and the pressure line up, and it's now actively asking where the next one is.
The Walk Score of 50 was never wrong, exactly. It's just an average, calculated the way averages always are, by folding a 79 near Westport and Ridgeway together with a 39 on South Hubbards Lane and everything in between. Chenoweth Lane was the reminder that a citywide number can be true and still miss the one street you actually walk every day. This year, for the first time in a decade, that particular street stopped being the exception.
If you're the kind of neighbor who tracks what's happening block by block in St. Matthews, whether it's a sidewalk finally landing on Chenoweth or a new set of survey results feeding the city's next round of walkability decisions, that's exactly the kind of local detail we like keeping up with too. If a conversation about your own street, your home's place in this market, or what's coming next for the neighborhood would be useful, the team at The Schiller Team is always glad to talk, no pressure attached.
