WINDSOR, Ont. – The truck industry, with a few reservations, has welcomed a $300 million federal-provincial highway plan, designed to improve the flow of 14,000 trucks daily between Windsor and Detroit.

The low-key announcement, made recently, followed months of opposition by citizen groups and politicians to various proposed routes through the city, appears to be a compromise.

The plan steers away from putting new truck roads through more populated areas of the city and alleviates traffic congestion along the current often-clogged west side truck corridor, which runs nine kilometres between Hwy. 401 and the Ambassador Bridge.

The nine-point plan would create a new east side route along Lauzon Parkway between 401 and what has been the city-owned EC Row Expressway. Trucks will travel west along EC Row. The Ontario government will take over Lauzon and EC Row, and create a third truck lane in each direction. Meanwhile the current Hwy. 3/Huron Church Rd. corridor will be streamlined with grade separations between it and major cross streets and pedestrian overpasses.

Since Sept. 11 and new U.S. security measures, trucks often have been backed-up hours along the stretch, no joy for drivers but a source of aggravation to residents who complain of noise, pollution and the difficulty of motorists using city streets.

The plan also calls for government to “work together” with three private proponents of new border crossings. One by the Ambassador Bridge would create a segregated truck way, another by the Detroit River Tunnel Partnership would create truck-only tunnels under the Detroit River, and the third by the Mich-Can consortium would build a bridge on the city’s industrial west side connecting to I-75 south of Detroit’s central core. Other parts of the plan would see improvements at the Windsor-Detroit tunnel, greater use of traffic technology and pre-processing areas where drivers could get Customs paperwork done and be time released to the border.

Ontario Trucking Association president David Bradley applauded the decision, saying it would “significantly improve the flow” of trade across the border.

He said the current situation, with no freeway access to Detroit but where trucks, cars, pedestrians and 16 stop lights “co-mingle into a cauldron of congestion” is not good for anyone.

Bradley said most important is that the plan offers a “good platform” for such measures as future freeway access, more separation of cars and trucks and new border crossings.

Bradley’s sentiments were echoed by Steven Ondejko, president of Onfreight Logistics of Tecumseh, Ont. and president of the Windsor Transportation Club. “What it allows is the opening for additional border crossings which is really the crux of the whole thing,” Ondejko said.

But Angelo Pernasilici, co-owner of Windsor’s Laser Transport Inc., said the opposite, calling the plan “definitely not an improvement” because it doesn’t address the main cause of the back-ups, inadequate customs processing on the U.S. side. (Conversely, there is never really any backup of trucks entering Canada from Detroit.)

“We will not see improvements in the truckers’ problem until we have additional access locations.,” Pernasilici said.