The Detroit Bottleneck

Much has been in the news lately about the building, or rather delays in building a new international crossing over the Detroit river between Michigan and Ontario.  The governments on both sides have agreed that the heavy amounts of commercial traffic over the existing crossing, the Ambassador Bridge, have necessitated the building of a second bridge to handle this traffic.  The Canadian government, in fact, has pledged 550 million dollars (at the nearly even present exchange rates) to make this happen.

Unfortunately, things have been slow in coming to fruition regarding this expansion.  At the forefront of the debate is one Manuel Maroun, who has launched an incredible campaign to make sure his proposed vision of the new crossing, a bridge parallel to the Ambassador, which he also owns.  He has repeatedly stalled projects which he is bound by contract to have completed by now for the state of Michigan, including the connection complex that links the bridge to Interstates 96 and 75.  He has released many advertisements compelling local voters to write in to their representatives back in Lansing to put an end to the Canadian plan for a new bridge under their financial control, claiming it a waste of taxpayer money, despite, uh, Canada putting up the money for it in the first place.  Mr. Maroun has actually been brought to court over the matter, but still insists on his double span as being the only acceptable plan to move forward with.  Canada has insisted that it needs a new bridge that can form links directly to limited-access highways and not onto the same surface streets that the Ambassador bridge currently empties onto.

So is a new bridge under the financial control of those pesky Canadians (who have a right to collect tolls to re-coup the cost of the bridge) really necessary?  Yes.  Absolutely.  The amount of U.S.-Canada trade that funnels through the Ambassador alone is equal to the total volume of trade engaged in between the United States and various countries, including high-volume partners like Japan.  Why is this the case?  A good percentage of Canadian population, industry, and commerce is concentrated in the corridor stretching from Windsor to Quebec City.  The St. Lawrence and lower Great Lakes valley are essentially the Canadian equivalent of the east coast megalopolis that stretches from Boston to Washington, D.C.  On top of this, the cities of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Hamilton, Toronto, and downstream are notable for being inland sea ports capable of sending and receiving shipping from oceanic trade routes, while also serving as trade hubs within the North American continent.  That lovely Detroit River you see above might be freshwater and hundreds of miles inland, but it can function as well for shipping as New York Harbor or San Francisco Bay.  The fact of the matter is that Detroit is just too important of a trade corridor to be monopolized by one man.  Just take a look at this map.

Courtesy of Estafeta

It is an image of important trade corridors in U.S.-Mexico trade, and it still includes Toronto, despite being off the scope of the map.  Detroit not only funnels commercial traffic between the United States and Canada, but also Mexico!  Chicago might have won the historical battle to serve as the hub of travel between the great cities of the northeast and the interior, but Detroit has the advantage of sitting right at the gates between not two or even three but potentially dozens of nations.  For the moment, it has only a single rail tunnel and a very, very choked bridge which often has a solid line of trucks sitting on its span.  This is one bottleneck that needs to be widened, to the advantage of a little bit more than just the needs of one extremely wealthy man.