Seven More US Customs Booths Open At Ambassador Bridge

Did you miss it? A new border crossing across the river just opened up in Windsor/Detroit and it did not cost taxpayers a penny!

Isn't that the effect of the new Customs booths that the Ambassador Bridge Company built on both sides of the river. There are almost as many new Customs booths available as are in place at the Tunnel! And the cost was in the millions, not the billions!

If 4 new US Customs booths at the Ambassador Bridge virtually ended truck backups into the United States, will the opening of 7 new US Customs booths at the Ambassador Bridge virtually end car backups into the United States as well?

Once the Ambassador Gateway project opens in about a year from now, that project alone, without a new bridge, will be able to handle about twice the volume of trucks that pass through the border point today. The US DRIC consultant previously estimated that the new Ambassador Gateway Crossing can handle 5.4 million trucks, a volume substantially in excess of the 3 million plus that cross the border today.

How can anyone truly justify now the building of a new DRIC Bridge when there is no need for one today!

A new one may not be needed now for a decade or two as the MDOT Director has conceded. Imagine the difficulty that Senator Fortier will have trying to convince anyone to invest in a P3 DRIC Bridge in Windsor. To do so the Governments will have to take actions that make it absolutely clear that they are trying to eliminate the Ambassador Bridge as a competitor and that means a decades long lawsuit at the least.

Imagine the fun that Senator Cropsey will now have at his hearings when MDOT tries to justify the spending of billions of taxpayer dollars for an entire new DRIC project when the Ambassador Bridge is prepared to spend private dollars for its Enhancement Project. The key element will be that with the Bridge Company project, Michigan receives about $2 billion in federal matching funds that it can use for its road system.

It should be very interesting to see what the impact is of the opening of seven new US Customs booths at the Ambassador Bridge to be used during peak periods. What is very interesting as well is the commitment by US Customs to staff those booths.

Compare and contrast this attitude with that of Canada Customs where six new booths have been built by the Bridge Company but they are not being used even though Minister Prentice wants booths to be expanded across Canada to ease entry into this country and money has been set aside in the Budget to pay for this.

What this also shows is how the failure of our Mayor to act as a businessperson hurts this City. The expansion of seven booths almost equates to the number of booths that exist at the Tunnel today on the American side. It will be interesting to see if border crossers decide to move from the Tunnel to the Bridge in order to get across the border more quickly even with the Ambassador Gateway project being undertaken.

If that happens, then the attractiveness of the Tunnel as an investment has decreased significantly and one has to question whether the US side of the Tunnel will be still worth $75 million, if it ever was worth that much in the first place.

Delay, delay, delay seems to be the mantra of this Mayor. Now our friends in Detroit can understand first-hand what we on our side experience with this Mayor with his deal-making skills. He seems incapable of executing a business transaction in a timely fashion. He must be terrified that if his deal falls apart then he will be blamed. What he has not understood is that unfortunately the world does not wait for him to complete a business deal. It is about a year now and the Tunnel deal was supposed to have been completed last June. It now looks like Detroit Council will not go along with the transaction at all.

If that deal ever made sense, and it might have several years ago when the Mayor claimed that the Windsor-owned part of the Tunnel was worth up to $300 million, it certainly does not look like it makes any sense now. Our Council should insist that the Mayor back off immediately, assuming that they have the guts to tell the Mayor anything.

Since it would be difficult for the Tunnel to expand on the US side, the Tunnel is in deep doo-doo! I am sure you remember how 4 new truck booths ended truck line-ups. Will 7 new car booths do the same? What will this do to Tunnel volumes now and dividends in the future?

What Eddie has still not figured out as Mayor of Windsor is that he should be instructing Eddie as Chair of the Tunnel Commission to work with the Bridge Company to make the border work better for the benefit of the City.

Sure there is a need for competition but there is also a need for cooperation. If the two border operators can figure out a system to make the border less troublesome for tourists then the number of tourists would increase to the advantage of both crossings. They can still fight to get the vehicle and its toll revenue but they would be cooperating to get more vehicles so both would prosper. As I have already Blogged, border volumes are down in Windsor horrifically

Unfortunately however, Eddie has not been able to figure that out yet. How can he, when he calls the Bridge Co. the "enemy?"

Perhaps if he focused more on the border as Mayor and not as a border operator, the tourist business in Windsor would start prospering again! It is time that Council told Eddie to act as a Mayor and not as an entrepreneur.

Assuming there will be the same success for cars as there was for trucks, then one has to question the need for billions of taxpayer dollars to be spent on a new border crossing on both sides of the river.

What is needed is NOT new lanes across the River since vehicle volume is decreasing but more Customs booths operating efficiently by being open and being properly staffed. What the DRIC people have failed to understand since they are not border operators is that there are ways and means to increase throughput without adding lanes. Remember this:

• "on 17 December 2004, Secretary Ridge and Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan met in Detroit and announced the “25% Challenge.” Its goal was to make quantifiable improvements in the transit times and reduce traffic congestion by leveraging the resources and leadership of the bridge, tunnel, and ferry owners in southeastern Michigan—specifically, to reduce transit times by 25% within one year...
  
  The private-sector stakeholders quickly came up with suggestions that could alleviate border congestion without requiring additional lanes or infrastructure...
  
  By the summer of 2005, nine months after Secretary Ridge and Canadian Deputy Prime Minister McLellan issued the 25% Challenge, the results were greater than skeptics had believed possible...
  
  Without the leadership and entrepreneurial energy that came directly from the private sector, it is highly unlikely that any meaningful improvements would have resulted. In fact, long-serving career government officials never thought it would be possible to achieve any significant reduction without massive new government spending."

Doesn't this sound eerily familiar. The goal can be accomplished without building a new bridge as Governments want to do. The 4 booths cost the Bridge Company a few million dollars and the 7 booths cost them a few million dollars more. The total cost of the 11 booths, and even throwing in the 6 booths in Canada, is nowhere near the billions that a new DRIC project would cost. It is nowhere near what Gridlock Sam's useless Horseshoe Road would have cost either.

There is a disconnect somewhere. Perhaps Senator Cropsey's hearings will discover where it is and then we on the Canadian side can find out if it is the same over here. Perhaps that might be a job for the Auditor General.

There is no doubt that new techniques and technologies will be created to speed vehicles through the border to make it virtually seamless in the future. If that is the case, again there is no justification for a new bridge.

I found a very interesting article dealing with the impact of one Customs booths at the Tunnel. It was based on a "SIMULATION IN INTERNATIONAL SERVICE – ANALYSIS OF WINDSOR-DETROIT TUNNEL TRAFFIC" undertaken by the University of Michigan. It "provided suggestions for ameliorating, severe delays at a publicly accessible transportation facility, the tunnel between Windsor, Ontario, Canada; and Detroit, Michigan, United States."

Here are the results:

• "Multiple replications of the model were run and compared under two scenarios typical at the time of the study: (1) five tollbooths open in Windsor and five customs booths open in Detroit; (2) five tollbooths open in Windsor and six customs booths open in Detroit. The two most significant performance measures of the tunnel are time-insystem and the percentage of time that access to the tunnel must be prohibited to vehicles wishing to enter it from Windsor to obey the prohibition against vehicles queuing within the tunnel itself. During the first half of the morning period (5AM - 7AM), scenario 1 was adequate. During the second half of the morning period (7AM - 9AM), scenario 2 quickly became dramatically superior to scenario 1...
  
  Hence, the closure of just one booth on the Detroit side nearly doubles the average time-insystem and multiplies by more than seven the probability that the tunnel will be closed to entry from the Windsor side at any given moment of time. Tunnel management quickly began to use these results in negotiations with the United States government relative to reassigning, at least temporarily, some military personnel from their regular duties to border patrol and customs duties to prevent severe increases in queuing times...
  
  the results of this study were a significantly contributing factor to the United States government's decision to add 97 customs officers to Michigan's border crossings vis-à-vis
  Canada."

Imagine therefore what the opening of seven car booths will accomplish!

If you personally want to understand the significance of opening seven new booths at the Ambassador Bridge and want to conduct your own experiment, I suggest that you go to a busy supermarket on a weekend afternoon and see what happens when a new cashier's check-out lane is opened up. They do not build a whole new store to move customers quickly.