Every time I drive my politically incorrect Durango across the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, Ont., and Detroit, Mich., I get the willies. That’s the only word I can find to describe the feeling of being on that long span a couple of hundred feet above the water — together with maybe 100 stationary trucks. I’m really not a nervous, fearful sort, but my imagination has no trouble conjuring up a collapse.

The bridge, you see, was built in 1929 when trucks were just a tad lighter and not exactly as numerous. I don’t have traffic figures to compare then and now, but hell, cross-border trade has expanded by 100 times in those 75 years. Seriously, I have to ask if the bridge can take the 10,000 heavy trucks it now holds aloft every day.

What I don’t have to ask, because I know the answer, is this: can this single, solitary bridge continue to handle 25 per cent of the world’s largest international trade partnership?

No. Absolutely not. But we knew that. And now it seems Manuel “Matty” Moroun, the guy who owns the bridge, agrees.

After maintaining for ages that capacity isn’t a problem, and won’t be for many years, Moroun’s Detroit International Bridge Co. recently filed permit applications with U.S. and Canadian authorities to build a second, $394-million bridge across the Detroit River. Its four lanes, with the capacity for adding two more, would run parallel to the existing bridge. Construction would take about five years.

Moroun’s isn’t the only formal proposal on the table. There’s also the Detroit River Tunnel Partnership, which aims to modify an existing Canadian Pacific train tunnel under the river to handle trucks. And then there’s the Mich-Can International Bridge Co., which wants to build a new bridge some 5 km west of the Ambassador. There may yet be others.

It’s all a bit of a moot point right now anyway. Trucks and their poor drivers will continue to sit for hours on end as they approach the border at a crawl, and the people of Windsor will continue to see their city split in two by that long ribbon of Macks and Petes and Western Stars until somebody decides what to do.

Nothing will happen until some pretty serious environmental assessments are done, and the terms of reference for that work have only just been published. In other words, a decision is years and years away, and that’s before construction starts.

Would an expanded Ambassador Bridge solve the problem anyway? Would the other proposals? Who knows?

Well, actually, somebody might know, or at least she could probably paint a pretty good picture.
Ann Arquette, the ex-Canada Customs officer who runs Border Gateways Management Inc. (BGM), now has an advanced simulation-based planning and scheduling tool. It can simulate on a computer screen what happens at the border given various conditions like a slowdown in secondary inspection lanes by U.S. customs inspectors or perhaps an accident on the approach to the bridge. I’ve seen it in action and it’s unbelievably slick and capable.

Ann, you may remember, is the only one offering an immediate solution to the Windsor mess, namely a truck staging area 20 km back from the existing bridge. From there, trucks would be customs-cleared if need be and then “filtered” back onto Highway 401 to prevent the sometimes incredible traffic chaos in Windsor and keep drivers comfortable in the meantime. Better they should wait at the BGM facility than spew diesel fumes into Windsor’s air for hours on end as they crawl toward the customs apron.

Ann has had opposition to this scheme from the Canadian trucking industry, for reasons that I can’t quite figure, and Canadian bureaucrats and politicians don’t seem to be paying attention. Washington, on the other hand, has been keen to know more, looking seriously at BGM’s capabilities in border-zone traffic-management systems, with Mexican crossings in mind.
The simulation tool was created out of an alliance with Visual8 Corporation of Mississauga, Ont., a software development company specializing in simulation solutions. Obviously, its purpose is partly to prove BGM’s ability to solve the Windsor problem in the short term. But just as obviously, it’s a tool that could be applied to examining the potential of any of the bridge or tunnel proposals as well. Before millions of dollars are spent. In fact, Ann says she wants to map all of North America this way, including facilities like the Port of Los Angeles.

I find it astonishing that the only truly creative response to border issues has come from a little company like BGM. Not for the first time, my hat’s off to Ann and her small crew. If the politicians and bureaucrats had one tenth of her energy and her vision, we’d have this one licked.