The Decibel - A new Canada-U.S. border crossing and Windsor’s economic boom

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

For the first time in almost a century, North America’s busiest border crossing – between Detroit and Windsor – is expanding. The Gordie Howe International Bridge is finally connected after six years of construction and a slew of delays, cost increases and political woes. The bridge is expected to improve trade between Canada and the U.S., while bolstering Windsor’s economic revitalization.The Globe’s national science reporter, Ivan Semeniuk, joins the show to discuss the bridge’s progress, what its economic effects will be and why the bridge is more than just a physical connection.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

So I was born in Windsor. I grew up in the Windsor area, in fact, in a town called Amherstburg, which is where the Detroit River empties out into Lake Erie. That's The Globe's science reporter, Ivan Semenik. And that river has been a feature of my life, you know, going back to childhood. It's always been a fascinating kind of geographic element in my life. But the river's landscape is changing with the building of a massive new bridge,

the Gordie Howe International Bridge. It's the largest ever built between Canada and the U.S. Not only is the bridge vital for expanding trade between the two countries, but it's also a feat of engineering. The two sides of the bridge joined over the river in June, but it's not supposed to open to traffic until next fall, after years of delays and cost increases.

So today, Ivan is on the show to explain how the bridge is being constructed and the impact it will have on future cross-border trade. I'm Mainika Ramanwelms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Ivan, it's great to have you here. Manika, it is great to be here. Ivan, we're going to start just really basic here. What is this new bridge, this Gordie Howe International Bridge? Tell me about it.

We'll start with the name. Gordie Howe, for those who may not remember, was a longtime NHLer, born in Saskatchewan, played more than 20 seasons with the Detroit Red Wings. So it's sort of a name that resonates on both sides of the border. You know, a Canadian who, you know, was sort of a local hero for Detroit hockey. The Detroit River is a very short but very wide river. It's about as wide as the Mississippi. So it's not an insignificant body of water to cross. It's extremely busy with lake and ocean going boats that ply up and down the Great Lakes. And the crossing over that river is the busiest trade corridor between Canada and the US. So it's a very important crossing economically. And the crossing over that river is the busiest trade corridor between Canada and the U.S.

So it's a very important crossing economically. And the fact that a new structure is appearing to essentially expand that corridor is very significant for the region. And the fact that it will also have this sort of spectacular design and be a very obvious feature on the landscape gives it even more weight, I think. And we're going to get into the design stuff for sure. But just first, how big is this bridge going to be when it's done? It's big. It's a type of bridge that the design is called cable stayed.

It will, when it's completed, be the largest bridge of that type in North America. So the total length of the bridge is two and a half kilometers. The central span, which is where you really measure how big of a deal the bridge is, the central span is about 853 meters wide, which is the width of the river at that point. So it's a really significant structure. And Ivan, you actually visited the bridge recently. Can you just describe what you saw and what it felt like to be on that? It was great fun. We had an opportunity to visit the site. We went up on a temporary cage, you know, up to the bridge deck. So the towers reach up to 220 meters, but the deck is 42 to 46 meters. And that itself is like standing on a 10-story building,

almost like being on the wing of an airplane when you're up there and you're looking down over the river, you can see the other bridge far away. You can look down the river the other side as it kind of opens up and ships coming and going. And what you really notice when you're on that roadway is looking up and seeing all of these cables sort of converging, like in a perspective drawing, you know, converging on the vanishing point up high where they're attached to the towers. Each one, though, is a bundle of smaller steel cables. They'll be sheathed in a kind of plastic casing that also has structures on it, for example, to discourage ice buildup and other things. But inside, it's almost like strands of dental floss. You know, you've got these smaller cables that are all bundled together. If you could put them all end-to-end, it would be about 5,000 kilometers long.

So it would pretty much stretch across Canada if you could take all the cabling on this bridge. And that's what's really carrying the load of the deck and carrying it right up to the top of the towers. And it's those cables fanning out that I think really give the bridge almost like a delicate quality. Because from a distance, they look like little strings. But you realize that the entire weight of that thing is hanging on them. Wow. It sounds like a quite a project here, really. And you mentioned it's called a cable stage bridge design, Ivan. So what does that mean? And then how does it look? So from an engineering point of view, there are a few different kinds of bridges. You know,

when we look back in history, we sort of think, you know, the classic bridges of the 19th century were these kind of iron truss bridges, like you sort of imagine them in the old movies, you know, with locomotives going across them and so on. But the 20th century was really defined by the big suspension bridges. You know, these are the ones that have two big cables draped over a couple of towers. Usually it's the Golden Gate Bridge, for example, in San Francisco. And in fact, over the Detroit River, there's a suspension bridge called the Ambassador Bridge opened in 1929. And when it opened, it was at that time the world's largest suspension bridge. So the Detroit River has seen big bridges and has, you know, kind of broken records in the bridge department in the past. What has changed is materials and design has changed to the point where often it is more advantageous to do a different type of bridge. It's something like a suspension bridge, but instead of these big giant cables that you kind of see going across, and then they have to be anchored far back on either side. Instead, you've got the two towers,

and then you kind of have a fan of smaller cables extending downward. These kinds of bridges are very efficient in terms of materials. They actually take less material than a suspension bridge, and they're good for sort of an intermediate length. Once the span of the bridge has to be more than a kilometer, people tend to not do the cable-stayed bridges. They tend to go back to the traditional suspension bridge. And you said the main part of the bridge is 850 meters, so it's getting up there. Right. But this one is in the zone where a large cable-stayed bridge could be done. The way the load is distributed, you can have kind of a lighter road deck, use less material

on the deck. In fact, the entire deck is only about two and a half meters thick. So when you're looking at this bridge from a distance, it almost looks like a ribbon in the sky. It is so thin, and it's got these lovely cables sneaking down. So the other side effect is that in addition to being more efficient on materials, there's a kind of airy quality to these cable state bridges. And so this is an example where it's not just a big building, but it's a very pretty structure that everyone is marveling at as it takes shape. And as you're describing it, Ivan, so you're talking about the two kind of pillars on either side of the land. It sounds like there's no structures in the water, though, as supports, right? That's interesting. And that was a design choice early on. So various companies

competed to design the bridge. So the winning design made that choice that the river is, you know, about 850 meters wide. So they could manage to build the two towers on either side without ever having to build anything in the water. So no part of this bridge actually touches the water. Whereas, you know, just up the river, five kilometers, the Ambassador Bridge does have its two main towers positioned right in the water. So of course, that would add to the work in constructing the bridge if you have to dam off part of the river and then start constructing in the riverbed. So it saves on time and cost if you don't have to build in the water. And of course, there's a safety factor. And we all saw this too, with the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, where a ship colliding

with a bridge and this, you know, it's not always with a spectacular destruction of the bridge, but it's still a problem. So they have kind of removed that navigational hazard. And of course, they did this long before the Baltimore situation. But that was another choice that was made. And essentially, once they made that choice, and decided, you know, the bedrock was fine to support these big towers, the design kind of flowed from there. Wow. Okay, so Ivan, as you mentioned, we've already got the Ambassador Bridge. We also have the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel for vehicles to go through as well.

So if we already have these two crossings, why do we need this new bridge? Well, both of those crossings are approaching 100 years old, the bridge in 1929, the tunnel in 1930. The ceiling height of the tunnel doesn't accommodate large trucks. So you can kind of take that off the table for a lot of trade. The bridge, the Ambassador Bridge has four lanes of traffic, two in each direction. And that's how the situation has been for this busiest crossing between Canada and the US for close to a century. The idea of expanding that has been on the table for decades. Growing up in that area, it seemed to me there was always some talk of, you know, would there ever be another bridge?

Where would it be? How would it work? Who would pay for it? You know, these are always kind of open questions floating in the air. I think what really brought it home was 9-11. The border was closed very abruptly, and the impact was immediate and measurable when the trade was cut off. So I think that was a bit of a stimulus for governments on both sides. The Ambassador Bridge has always been privately owned, and at the time was owned by a fairly combative businessman named Matty Maroon. His plan was to double or twin the Ambassador Bridge, have another bridge right beside it running right through downtown Windsor and kind of was looking for support to do that. But there were problems there, including the fact that it would mean kind

of plowing through several neighborhoods in Windsor with the increased traffic. And it wasn't just the fact that you needed another bridge. There needed to be a better connection between the highways on both sides, the 401 in Ontario, I-75 in Michigan. And when you've got all these trucks kind of trundling through city traffic, you know, that was also a problem. After years of study, the Canadian government then reached an agreement with state and federal governments in the U.S. about where the bridge could be built. Canada took on the cost of building the bridge entirely. Canada's paying the entire cost?

Canada's paying the whole shot. It's kind of the opposite of the Ambassador Bridge, which was paid for by U.S. interests back then. But the payoff there is that Canada collects all the tolls from the bridge, which will all be paid on the Canadian side. So over time, the bridge will pay for itself. I think that's the idea. So the location of the bridge not only increases the amount of traffic that can go over. It's got six lanes, so three going in each direction. So kind of, you know, between the tunnel and the Ambassador Bridge, it effectively doubles the number of lanes.

You know, there was a study actually that the bridge commissioned, but it was done independently by this cross-border institute at the University of Windsor. Their estimate, and this is back in 2021, their estimate is that their bridge would save 850,000 hours a year of transit time. We'll be right back. So this is interesting. So we've talked about why it's so important to have this bridge for trade between the two countries. But I want to come back to this point about why Canada is paying for the entire bridge, Ivan. Like, doesn't this bridge benefit both countries? Why are we paying for it? It's a complicated dynamic, you know, because you've got both state and federal governments involved. And then you've

got this private owner of the Ambassador Bridge doing everything possible to try to slow things down with lawsuits, buying up properties to try to get in the way of a new bridge being built, all of that sort of thing. So I think in some ways, it may have been easier for Canada to take this on. You know, we've seen in the US how complicated it can be at times to get infrastructure projects through Congress, for example. So it may be that, you know, the whole dynamic made it easier for Canada to do this. And you mentioned that there were some delays with the owner of the Ambassador Bridge wanting some slightly different plans. I also understand, of course, the pandemic set this back a little bit.

How did that affect things? Well, construction really began after 2018. And, you know, bridges like this usually take a few years, but this one has now been under construction for essentially six years. The pandemic was, you can imagine, on a major construction site when people are in lockdown, you know, that's going to set everything back. So it, that did set back things more than a year, and it also increased the cost. But it's not just the pandemic. I mean, if you pay attention to, you know, bridge stuff,

big bridges are going up around the world, you know, in Southeast Asia, in the Middle East, for example. But mostly these bridges are being built in warm climates where it's actually possible to work longer and you may have longer work days as well. Despite the fact that we think of Windsor as not the coldest part of Canada, for many of the people who are coming to work on this project from abroad, it's still a relatively cold place.

And so the wintertime slows down the construction quite a bit. Ivan, we've talked a little bit about the economics at play here, but let's get into this more. So in the last few years, Windsor has really started to see more economic growth. Of course, there's that new battery plant, the Nexstar EV battery plant that's there. The city's economy is expected to grow at an annual rate of 2.9%. This is according to the Conference Board of Canada over the next three years. I guess, can you put this into context for us? What is the role of this new Gordie Howe Bridge in relation to this growth that's happening? You know, if you spend a lot of time in the area, you don't think of it so much as being on the edge of something as you're kind of at the center of something.

So it's important to recognize that when we're talking about Windsor and Detroit, how they're interlinked economically, having a piece of infrastructure like this in place and having a smooth flow of people and goods across that watery thoroughfare is kind of essential. Exactly how much it will benefit is hard to say. It will certainly bring jobs, you know, just kind of running the bridge and make certain things easier in terms of moving things back and forth. But I think as time goes on and it becomes a fact of life, both for goods and for the people who are trying to get from one place to another, it'll be hard to imagine life without it. And just again, to put this in context, Ivan, how much trade actually goes through this corridor? 19% of all cross-border trade goes through

the Detroit-Windsor corridor. So that's a lot for all of Canada, considering all the different border crossings there. I mean, there are nine other bridges just in the Great Lakes area, none of them compared to the traffic that's going across here. 30% of all truck traffic between Canada and the US. And that is essentially almost all of that now crossing the Ambassador Bridge. Of course, this region and the Detroit River has been a significant place for trade and crossing for a long time, right? I want to look at kind of some of this, you know, the history from the 19th and the 20th

century, if we can, Ivan. Can you just tell me a little bit about how that took shape in this region? Sure. It's such an interesting part of the world. And it's so often overlooked, you know, this for thousands of years, indigenous people have lived here, moved back and forth. There are historic trails that indigenous people use, famous trails that come to crossing points on the river. So that history is there. When Europeans first arrived, it was actually the French who first started to explore this region, coming basically from New France, from Quebec. And they were literally stunned by what they saw. And you just have to imagine, of course, the St. Lawrence

is beautiful, but Quebec is pretty far north. And it's a harsh climate for the French colonists that were trying to make a go of it in the St. Lawrence. Imagine explorers coming down and seeing the Detroit River, seeing this incredibly rich area, and also so much milder and climate. It just seemed like, wow, this is a focal point. Lots and lots of settlers arrived over the following decades of the 1700s. And then it changed soon after with the American Revolution. So then the Michigan side ended up becoming part of the United States. along an international boundary, you know, even though for so long it was more of a main street in a way. So despite the fact that it's two separate countries, the need for it to be a crossing point has never gone away. So then into the 19th century, into the 1800s, the back and forth trade was always present and there was always pressure for more. So obviously boats were

important, ferries and so on. When the railway came, then there was a question, well, how do we get the train across? So for a good chunk of time, there were ferry boats that would literally take rail cars back and forth between Detroit and Windsor. By 1910, the Michigan Central Railway had built a tunnel under the river. So the first effort to cross without a boat was to go under the river with a tunnel, but that was for rail cars. And it was at that moment that automobiles were starting to become popular. And you could see that the need for a bridge was there. The question was going to be how big of a bridge, because it was going to have to be big enough to cross the width of the river,

not insignificant, and high enough to allow these steamers going up and down. And by then, the boats going up and down the river were getting pretty big. So by the time you get to the Ambassador Bridge, we're talking monumental 20th century scale, and any other crossing since then has had to sort of be in that domain. Wow, that's so interesting. We've talked about a lot of the economics here, Ivan, but for a moment, can we just kind of look at the symbolism of this project and what this bridge means? Like, what does this represent? The two sides have been

interacting since long before Canada or the United States existed as countries. So it's the most natural thing in the world, I think, to facilitate that crossing. Of course, it shows that friendly relationship between Canada and the US. It hasn't really happened in our lifetime to see a project like this in this part of the world. Big bridges are being built elsewhere around the globe, but the Great Lakes is an old industrial area, has not seen a lot of new infrastructure. So it's amazing to have it in our backyard. Just lastly, before I let you go, Ivan,

so what has to happen next in the construction and when can we actually see this bridge open? What's interesting is now that we have the two sides touching, the bridge now officially is a crossing because you can actually now get from one side to the other. So border agencies are now present on the site on both sides. Workers have to show their papers just to get on the work site now because in theory you could cross now. So it has become a legal crossing. There were some labor issues actually

with the border security agencies. But it looks like at the moment that we're speaking now, it looks like those things are not going to be an obstacle now. And then the final construction of the bridge will take place. So there's more finishing work to be done on the structure. You have the buildings on either side that will be the ports of entry. You know, think of all the buildings that are at a typical border crossing. And this will be a busy border crossing. So it's, you know, these are large installations. It'll be about a year before everything is done.

The projected opening is sometime for the fall of 2025. Okay. Ivan, this was so interesting. Thank you for being here. Thank you. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. This episode was produced by our intern, Kelsey Arnett.

Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.