New bridge for Windsor

For the last few years there has been an ongoing fight on where and how to put a second bridge from Windsor to Detroit. Politics has of course overruled all and the fight is getting down to the end game. The two sides are the city of Windsor with our mayor Eddie Francis at the helm and DRIC the binational study group that is looking at all options or so they say.

The Windsor proposal is called Greenlink and is about the access to the new bridge. They don't have any problems with the bridge itself just the access road through the city. They have a nice web site that shows there view on things.

http://www.greenlinkwindsor.com/

DRIC on the other hand has their site which tells their story.

http://www.partnershipborderstudy.com/

The long and the short of it is that Windsor wanted the access route tunnelled below ground with parks above. DRIC wanted a below grade road with no tunnelling. Of course there is more to it. Thousands of details that were nit picked over. Windsor hired some very good experts and comprimised with the Greenlink which would tunnel about 2/3rds of the route. DRIC responded with a new proposal which covered about 1/3rd

DRIC says that the Windsor proposal doesn't meet spec, costs too much and so forth. Windsor says that DRIC doesn't know shit about tunneling as they are using Ontario provincial transport engineers who have never tunneled anything in Ontario.

A huge pissing match that will come to no good end for sure. Add the multiple levels of politicians in the mix and the people of Windsor are now suffering battle fatigue and just want something built. I am sure that DRIC was counting on that and figure that they would just give up. Eddie has other ideas though and will not let it die. He has lots of support and may take them to court especially after they admited that they didn't look at the new Windsor plan as an option.

I am sure though in the end we will get screwed by our polititions especially at the provincial level. They don't give a shit about the people, just the bucks. Get it done and get it done cheap. That is their mantra.

The irony is that the whole thing started because of the traffic conjestion and increase in truck traffic. With both the American and Canadian economies headed to the toilet we won't need the new bridge for a while, sigh.

And then there is Manny Maroun, but that is another story.