Credibility

Eddie's Press Release was titled: "DRIC Changes Rules Again." Why is he complaining? They did as he asked. They changed the conversation!

Poor Eddie. It really wasn't necessary for DRIC to hire outside engineers. Eddie did it to himself. He destroyed his own credibility as no one else could on the costing issue. I wonder how he will blame himself.

How does it feel, dear reader, to be used, to be played by the Mayor and City Council for so long? How does it feel to be treated as a pawn in a game and see, what, $1 million, being spent on ad blitzes for Greenlink that will accomplish absolutely nothing. How many Library books would that amount have purchased?

I posted the DRIC response to Greenlink. The City posted its response Monday afternoon. They should have waited a little bit longer and thought about what they said. It was pathetic. Take a look at it at http://www.citywindsor.ca/NewsReleaseFinalDRICRuleChange.pdf

It looks like we Bloggers were pretty accurate in our comments about costing right from the beginning. Did Eddie really believe that he could hide about $1 billion of extra cost? In fact, my own belief is that the DRIC projections are too low considering that the shoulders have to be widened on both sides of the Schwunnels. But what is a few hundred million more between friends.

You know when someone is desperate when the first page of the City's press release does not deal with the topic. That page was just filler including the brief resumes of two experts who were not given the full information in the first place by the Greenlink team it would appear. When you go and take a look at their peer review, it does not appear that they were given the information that the Greenlink road was not the full-length to the border.

Oh by the way, to be dazzled by the experts' skills, go and read their qualifications, the pages and pages of them. Are you impressed? Their opinion is only as good however as the information that they are given in the first place.

The press release continues on an irrelevancy when it stated:

• "We note that despite repeated requests, DRIC has not provided any breakdown of their cost estimate of the Parkway, in spite of an agreement to do so. Unfortunately a detailed examination of their costing cannot be completed as they have chosen to not release this information for public scrutiny."

What has that got to do with the costing done by Eddie's experts? I am sure that the DRIC road costs are just as inaccurate as the Greenlink ones will be in the end. That is generally what happens according to our Danish professor who wrote about Megaprojects.

If Eddie and Gord are to be fair they do have to admit that the DRIC team was correct:

• "DRIC questioned the GreenLink cost estimate, suggesting the cost would be substantially higher than claimed by the GreenLink team."

The DRIC estimated number for Greenlink turned out to be $2.3 billion to $2.5 billion. That amount is up to $800 million higher than Eddie wanted us to believe. And almost exactly what Gord wrote about months ago! Such a co-incidence. The Sheriff strikes again!

The major reason for the discrepancy is that Eddie had his consultants stop right at EC Row and not go to the border. The excuse is a lame one:

• "the GreenLink team, given no information to the contrary by DRIC, and no information released by DRIC in the form of a cost estimate for the Parkway, relied on the Parkway limits that were presented in their August 2007 open house material and conceptual graphics."

Oh please, if DRIC's road costs went right to the border, then Greenlink's road costs could have given some kind of estimate so that apples could be compared with apples. But of course, that could never be done because then Greenlink would have been kicked out months ago and how could Eddie have stalled the process.

Then there is the little issue about which dollars should be used, 2007 dollars as Greenlink did to keep the costs artificially down or those of 2011 as DRIC used, the time when the project would probably start. In fact, the 15% rate used by DRIC could be too low given the experience that we've had with construction projects in Windsor rising dramatically from the date of initial estimate to the date of construction starting.

The shoulder width issue arose again in the press release. Now I don't really know who's right but if there is a need for a wider shoulder, then the costs have to increase dramatically. I decided to find out what an expert said in this matter dealing with a situation involving a tunnel in the Windsor area previously. That expert is none other than the City's expert Sam Schwartz:

• "The consultant (SCHWARTZ) criticized the DRTP for its planned feeder roads taking traffic through neighbourhoods and the safety of shoving big rigs into the tight confines of 95-year-old two-lane rail tunnel.
  
  "The biggest issue was the rail tunnel itself being used for trucks given that if a truck is perfectly centred it would only have 0.7 metre on either side," he said. "There is an unforgiving wall on either side."
  
  He described it as a "cattle-chute design."
  
  "I hate that for the crash potential," Schwartz said. "Then the only way to get a truck out is to approach from head on. It may start up again and be approaching you at 80 km/h."
  
  He said any accident or disabled vehicle in the rail tunnel would take 15 to 30 minutes to clear. In that time, 200 to 400 trucks could back up behind a stalled rig and "you never could recover the rest of the day from that."
  
  He said the DRTP offers no median or shoulders in the tunnel, while the feeder routes would cause chaos on local streets, especially in the already overburdened Dougall Avenue-E.C. Row Expressway intersection, listed as the main access point.
  
  "It would be trying to do too much at Dougall and E.C. Row -- even if they had a direct link to Highway 401," Schwartz said. "It really fails there from a safety point of view."

Gee, it looks like he wants a wider shoulder too. Just take a look at the movie that I had posted previously about the Russian tunnel that had no shoulders.

The interesting a part of the Press Release though had nothing really to do with costing. Read these two comments:

1. "it is envisioned that an international border crossing including a new bridge would include a control centre, which would act as a control centre for both the crossing and the approach road."
   
2. "Reiterating the above, an international border crossing including a new bridge location would include an operating and maintenance plan."

Those two statements seem to say as clearly as possible that the Senior Levels do not have the money to pay for the road to the Bridge. The road and bridge are lumped together. Now I know why the Province has never said how much money they would pay while the Feds have only talked about $400 million.

I assume that it is expected that the P3 investor is supposed to finance the road as well. Is that why Mark Butler talked about the Nexus/FAST Levy i.e. if you want to go across the border quickly, then you have to pay extra to do so. The investor would need to generate additional income!

That makes the investment virtually one of bankruptcy for any investor unless the Ambassador Bridge is put out of business right away.

It just gets uglier and uglier and stupider and stupider each day. The Bridge Co. people must be laughing themselves silly as the bureaucrats scramble since they are afraid to talk to them about a reasonable resolution of the border issue.

Our Mayor has completely lost his credibility as far as I'm concerned. His Greenlink proposal, like the Schwartz Report #1 and full tunneling, can be seen for what it is... nothing more than a stall tactic to put pressure on the Senior Levels to accomplish some agenda that only Eddie he knows about. Why he had to try to pull the wool over our eyes, I will never understand.