Buy a Border Bridge! No Money Down

This article describes how cash-squeezed Michigan plans a new Detroit River crossing to Canada with ‘no risk’ to its weary taxpayers. Officially, the long-running project to eventually build a new cross-border bridge in southeast Michigan is identified as the Detroit River International Crossing (DRIC). For those truckers who have idled for hours on or in front of the venerable Ambassador Bridge, deadlines running out for their just-in-time loads of new auto components, the experiences at the Detroit-Windsor crossing are very slow and costly. For the past decade, through the ups and downs of public meetings, environmental reviews, funding dilemmas and political grandstanding (all times two since what happens on one side of the river must essentially be replicated on the other), it’s that one fact – the wait – that prevails. The wait is almost over if the new State of Michigan Administration under Republican Gov. Rick Snyder has its way. The state is looking at the overall need to create an environment in Michigan conducive to job growth. There really is just a critical need to make that freeway-to-freeway connection. The state believes that southeast Michigan, this particular corridor, has an opportunity to be a major international intermodal transportation hub. The rail crossing is in place, as is a major international airport a little further west, but the key to future prosperity is relieving the ground transportation bottleneck via a new downriver crossing, directly linking to Interstate 75 south of Detroit and Highway 401 across the creek in Windsor, Ontario, providing additional access to not only Michigan’s major trading partner, but to Canadian ports positioned to relieve the overcrowding at U.S. docks. The Ambassador Bridge, first opened in 1929, is the busiest North American border crossing today and yet traffic flow often remains a mere trickle, damming the heavy flow of cross-border trade that is reflective of the continent’s modern-day manufacturing structure. Most of the $43 billion in trade between Michigan and Ontario travels over this privately-owned bridge; the nearby Detroit-Windsor Tunnel is jointly owned by the two cities and is for local core-to-core traffic, mostly cars. The recent Gateway Project on the U.S. side has somewhat improved flow from the Ambassador Bridge to I-75; the Canadian side remains an urban tangle, in which all vehicles to and from the bridge must drive along a city street, in front of homes and businesses, for about 8 miles. The current administration is pushing a Michigan bill that would set in place a structure under which “private-sector” construction and management would proceed on what would be an additional bridge owned bilaterally by the neighboring nations.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.