Before shelling out millions for light rail, city council should look at St. Louis, where a population twice the size of Ottawa's can barely muster a rush hour on rails.

To sum it, or should we say "summit" it all up: They came, they ranted, and they left. And they were also, for the most part, left wing. With due respect for the organizers of last week's summit, whom by most accounts pulled-off a top notch affair, the "smart growth" summit could have easily passed for an urban planning policy session at an NDP convention.

Reading the newspaper coverage on-line as well as surfing by the Ottawa2020 web site, the conformity of opinion on display last week at City Hall was astounding. While some may say this was a case of "great minds thinking alike," others could also conclude that it was confirmation of an environment where "fools seldom differ."

Sadly, yours truly could not attend due to a prior speaking engagement at a joint meeting of the World Taxpayers Association and National Taxpayers Union in St. Louis. However, as a service to the citizens of Ottawa, I keenly observed some of St. Louis' attempts to put smart growth principles into practice.

Last week, growth summit delegates were told repeatedly that more strategic investment in public transit is a must to stop urban sprawl and get people out of their highway jamming cars. In addition, Ottawans were told to invest in the downtown core to make it more of a people place for sporting events, festivals, and pedestrian pursuits, thereby avoiding the doughnut effect plaguing several American, and increasingly, Canadian cities.

Well, St. Louis has done both. The MetroLink is their light rail transit system that runs from the Lambert International Airport through the ‘burbs (including lower-income projects where automobile ownership is low compared to the average in Missouri) into the downtown core and across the Mississippi for a few stops into East St. Louis, Illinois. As transit systems go, it is clean, safe and efficient. Station stops are also strategically placed along the route with ample parking at most of them.

However, after witnessing and riding the MetroLink at different periods of the day, I found that I could always get a seat, except on Saturday afternoon when the crush of a post-game Cardinals crowd jammed the rails for about 40 minutes. But morning and afternoon commuter rush hours were almost non-existent, and ridership is so low that mid-day (11:30 am to 1:30 pm) voyages through four or five stops in the downtown core are free. By comparison, Interstate 70 was always busy regardless of the time of day.

So I wondered if this was a population density problem. Yet Metro St. Louis has a population of about 2 million people with almost 900,000 people living within the city limits. Indeed, this was perplexing and forced me to think about Ottawa's situation. If a major mid-west American city can't support a light-rail system, how can Ottawa with a lower population and lower population density to boot support one? Sadly what the proponents of more transit, including light rail, didn't share with us last week is the fact that light-rail systems usually pull 80% of their ridership from bus routes, not cars.

Apart from the St. Louis arch, an impressive 660-foot structure, the downtown core is also home to a major park stretch running from the foot of the arch up a dozen city blocks to the old Post office and refurbished Union Station, now home of the Grand Hyatt hotel and an impressive indoor shopping mall. In addition, the core boasts three major sports venues: Busch stadium, home of the St. Louis Cardinals; the Kiel Centre, home of the Blues and the TWA dome where the Rams play their NFL home games.

The MetroLink stops at Union Station, Busch Stadium, the Kiel Centre and the St. Louis Convention Centre, which is right next door to the TWA dome, and LaCleede's Landing, a market like restaurant and bar district. The core was also the home to several sports bars and top-notch restaurants, the historic old courthouse of Dred Scott slavery trial fame, not to mention upscale high-rises and condos. Yet with all this, the transit system was underutilized, the streets in mid-day were surprisingly quiet and weekend pedestrians were sparse to non-existent.

Many of the principles articulated by smart growth planners were on full display and implementation in St. Louis, and one could rightfully conclude, they weren't working. To be fair, the example of one city should not form the basis for accepting or discarding a planning approach.

However, by the same token, before Ottawa embarks on its journey toward a utopian dream of a clean, green, mixed-use, and people friendly city, along with consequent billions of dollars this multi-generation program will cost, it may wish to find out what works and what doesn't by actually experiencing other cities, and not just accepting the whiz bang PowerPoint presentations and Greenpeace-friendly words from a variety of "consultants."

Managing Ottawa's growth must be more than Soviet-style, five-year GOSPLAN theories. It is must be much more than this. Long-standing transportation and behaviour patterns must be considered. Vote trading at city council has to be addressed. And the realities of the demands of community associations and councillors' first-instinct desire to think small and play ward boss must be acknowledged. Finally, this is about what we can afford.

The "experts" conveniently overlooked these exigencies last week, but we'll touch upon them next week.