How The Bridge Gadgeteer Keeps On Winning

How can bureaucrats and a former young entrepreneur of the year who play with taxpayer money and not their own ever believe that they can defeat someone who puts his own bank account on the line every day with his border crossing.

The thought that DRIC with their proposed multi-billion dollar bridge project, Eddie with the undisclosed business case Tunnel deal and the Port Authority with an unworkable ferry taxi service for commuters can take away business from the Ambassador Bridge is laughable. These are all money-losers with taxpayers paying the bills.

If the Tunnel deal was not dead before, it is now. I speculated before that Infrastructure Ontario might have valued the Tunnel in the range of $15-$20 million. Obviously that amount has to come down drastically after the Bridge Company's new actions. I do not see someone else coming in to take their financial place in offering anything near the $75 million that Eddie wants to pay for the Detroit half of the Tunnel. They were Eddie's last hope.

Why would they... under the Mayor's leadership, the value of the Tunnel, its revenues and traffic volume have dropped like stones. If one thought that they could take over the Tunnel and do well with it, US DRIC's expectation that they are going to take away 25% of the Tunnel's traffic when the new bridge opens and the Ambassador Bridge's actions should put an end to that foolish notion.

I'm sure that you read the Star story about the transponder that the Bridge Company is offering to speed people through tollbooths after they have used their Nexus card to speed through Customs on both sides of the river. In addition, the Bridge Company keeps adding new Customs booths on both sides of the river so that people can go through even more quickly.

In fact, with the new booths opened recently, the Bridge Company has added in almost the equivalent number of booths as are located at the Detroit/Windsor Tunnel. In other words, we have a new crossing already!

Along with RFID chips that will reduce Customs delays by 30 seconds per vehicle or so, the volume of vehicles that can be processed at the existing bridge alone has increased dramatically. In fact, especially for approved commuters, the border will become virtually invisible with almost no stopping required.

Where the Governments would spend huge sums of money of taxpayer money and achieve little as with Sam's Horseshoe Road or the DRIC bridge, the Bridge Company spends their own cash to achieve results.

Add in a discount on the amount of the tolls and a discount on the cost of gasoline, one wonders why anyone would ever use the Tunnel again.

For the potential DRIC bridge investor... well now you understand why the Canadian Government is so desperate to get rid of the Owner of the Bridge Company. Some private party that invested $1 billion or more in the DRIC project could go bankrupt competing with the Bridge Company. That is why in my opinion the Government hoped to scare them into selling out cheaply.

I wonder what Senator Fortier will do now.