OTA rejects TV ads labelling proposed Windsor-Detroit bridge ‘road to nowhere’

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TORONTO, Ont. — Ontario Trucking Association president David Bradley has criticized recent television advertisements which attack Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty over monies allocated to building a freeway link to the proposed new, publicly-owned bridge at Windsor-Detroit.

Bradley says “most people will see through the blatant self-interest” inherent in the ads, bought and paid for by the Canadian arm of the US company that privately owns the Ambassador Bridge.

“Far from being a road to nowhere as the TV commercials suggest, this is a highway to jobs and prosperity,” says Bradley. “There’s no point in building a new bridge if it does not have freeway-to-freeway access on both sides of the border.
“As far as I know, all the political parties in Ontario – at all levels of government – support the new bridge. It is the most important infrastructure project in the country and it is years overdue.

“The residents of Windsor, truckers and other travellers, have long bemoaned the fact that the approach to North America’s busiest border crossing is basically a municipal road that wasn’t designed to handle the volumes of traffic we have today and that we will have in the future.” Referring to Huron-Church Road in Windsor, he says “a truck can travel from Toronto to Miami and it will go through 16 stop lights; 15 of them are in Windsor.”

Construction of the new bridge is the responsibility of the federal governments of Canada, the US and the State of Michigan. Ontario’s responsibility is to pay for the highway link to the bridge. The owners of the Ambassador Bridge have been fighting the new crossing saying it will build a second span at its bridge, without taxpayer money. However, the OTA notes that the group does not have the environmental approvals it would need from governments on both sides of the border.

According to Bradley, “Even if the Ambassador Bridge obtained the approvals to build its second span, we still need the new bridge. But the fact is there is only one bridge proposal that has the necessary environmental approvals and there is only one bridge project that will have a freeway link on the Canadian side.” Bradley says a new, public bridge will not put the Ambassador Bridge out of business. “It will still have an important role to play; a lot of traffic is local and will still use the Ambassador Bridge. It is well-run and competition is a good thing.”

The last hurdle to giving the green light to begin constructing the new bridge is the approval of the Michigan legislature. However, the state’s new Republican governor, Rick Snyder, supports the new bridge and a bill is expected to be voted on this fall. The Government of Canada has offered to pay Michigan’s share of the construction costs and recoup the money through tolls.

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  • no good trucker takes ambassdor bridge to miami. Peace bridge i79 to i77 to i26 to i95 and tampa in an additional i4. It sounds so stupid. Drivers that use that route to miami would be quickly terminated.

  • Could it be that the Ontario Trucking Association is speaking because it has “blatant self interest” in more highways being built?

  • This looks – and sounds like an AD from Hudac and his Provincial Conservatives. Trying – again – to kill manufacturing in Ontario.

  • “Could it be that the Ontario Trucking Association is speaking because it has “blatant self interest” in more highways being built?”

    Doesn’t that just mean that there’s actually a business case for building the bridge, contrary to what all the naysayers believe?

  • Bradley is right to speak out on this issue. A new bridge is needed to address the bottleneck, and now — with slack in the economy — is the right time to build it. The fact that the TV commercials are funded by an American company (that profits from the bottleneck) hoping to influence our political debate — I don’t think that’s well-understood, and if it were, I believe that many Ontarians would be pretty upset.