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  #21  
Old Posted Jun 27, 2011, 4:21 AM
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Originally Posted by Symz View Post
I've never heard such a thing in Canadian media about the government saying anything about laws and regulations on commercials pertaining to the Ambassador Bridge Company....


The Canadian government, I think, doesn't feel it's appropriate any longer for a private company to hold the reigns on an international border crossing. This company is starting to reek, and it's felt like they have held the public hostage. The bridge needs to be replaced and for the sake of streamlining things the government doesn't want a new bridge running through the city anymore.

It's a shame this drama has dragged out for as long as it has, lord knows the region, both here and in Detroit could use the jobs and infrastructure upgrade.
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the Liberal government house leader said there should be tighter rules governing third-party advertising

http://www.windsorstar.com/news/Mich...991/story.html
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  #22  
Old Posted Jun 27, 2011, 4:23 AM
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Some informational bullets from the www.infrastructureontario.com website


About the project:

The Windsor-Essex Parkway is the Ontario access road portion of the proposed new Windsor-Detroit border transportation system to improve the flow of goods and people between Canada’s and the United States’ busiest gateway.

Upon completion, Ontario’s Highway 401 will for the first time be directly connected to the United States interstate system. The Parkway will travel west from Highway 401 in southwest Ontario, Canada, through the City of Windsor and connect to a Canadian inspection plaza, a new international bridge, a Michigan inspection plaza and Interstate 75 in Michigan, USA.

The Windsor-Essex Parkway is the first transportation project in Ontario to be delivered using alternative financing and procurement. The Parkway will be publicly owned and controlled.

The Recommended Plan for the Windsor-Essex Parkway is documented in the Detroit River International Crossing Environmental Assessment Report, which was reviewed and approved under the Ontario Environmental Assessment Act.

Project Features:

The six-lane, 11 kilometre freeway and four-lane service road will have 11 covered tunnels, be built below grade, and have earth berms and noise barriers in place to minimize community impact. The tunnels range from 120 metres to 240 metres long, totaling 1.8 kilometres.

The Parkway will include more than 300 acres of green space and 20 kilometres of recreational trail.

Full construction of the Parkway will begin in summer 2011 and it will be open to traffic in fall 2014.
Community and Green Features:

The 20-kilometres of recreational trails will connect communities and promote healthy living.

The Parkway’s 300-acres of green space will integrate with local parks and other protected natural areas to create a green corridor that supports viable natural communities, links existing natural areas and buffers surrounding communities from the new freeway.

Species at risk and their habitats are protected for the long-term and where necessary, they will be relocated to areas that are restored, enhanced or created and protected.

Economic Benefits:

At the peak of construction, WEMG, the winning bidder, estimates that between 1,200 to 1,300 workers will be on the Parkway site daily.

WEMG partnerships with local business owners and institutions will ensure the success of the project during its design, construction and operation; these partnerships will help to strengthen the local economy, and create jobs and training.

Much of the Parkway’s construction and maintenance work will be performed by local labour force and local subcontractors.

WEMG estimates it will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on local labour, local supplies, and materials over the lifespan of the project.




I took the liberty of just stitching together the interactive map from the www.weparkway.ca website for the sake of just making things easier to visual within the thread, and I was bored.


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  #23  
Old Posted Jun 27, 2011, 4:42 AM
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Link doesn't work
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  #24  
Old Posted Jun 27, 2011, 4:54 AM
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The part about traffic decline isn't misleading but those commercials were full of other quotes from various sources (including the federal government) that were taken completely out of context. The average American watching them that hasn't followed this issue could easily be influenced. I have no problem with the government clamping down on advertising that is purposely trying to mislead people.
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  #25  
Old Posted Jul 24, 2011, 8:07 PM
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Looks like they're moving forward with this thing pretty aggressively.

Residential demolition:


Demolition of an outlet mall:
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  #26  
Old Posted Aug 12, 2011, 3:07 PM
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Interesting article in the Windsor Star today:

-----

Parkway project will be job bonanza

Economic impact to be felt right away

By Chris Vander Doelen, The Windsor Star August 12, 2011


Every construction company for 100 kilometres has been holding their collective breaths waiting for this moment: the kickoff to the biggest stimulus project of them all, the job that's going to put everybody in the industry back to work all at once.

Without fanfare, construction of the $1.6-billion Windsor Essex Parkway quietly began this week when utility crews started moving lines and demolition crews moved in to begin bulldozing 181 buildings still in the way of the last missing link in Highway 401 from Quebec to the U.S. Border.

Among the buildings to come down soon will be a gas station and other buildings at the corner of Howard Avenue and Highway 3. Job one is making room for the official ribbon-cutting ceremony, expected within weeks.

The parkway is the project "everybody's trying to get a piece of," says Jim Lyons, executive director of the Windsor Heavy Construction Association.

"As this project gears up there will be huge demand for labour."

Anticipating the crunch, the City of Windsor has deliberately cleared its books of all municipal construction projects for the next few months, Lyons says.

There will be no roads, sewers or other civic projects tendered.

City planners realized every contractor in the region will be vying for some of the 60 to 80 sub-contract packages that will be put out to tender for the massive job, one of the biggest in Canada this year.

"It's one of the largest infrastructure projects underway in the country - certainly in the top 10 for size and scope," says Garfield Dales, the most senior provincial bureaucrat overseeing the parkway project.

"All we've been hearing for months now is, 'when are shovels going to be in the ground? When does construction start?" Dales said at a recent open house for the project. "There is a real sense of people wanting to see this project start."

The economic impact of the project on the region will be huge, and it will be immediate, Dales added this week by e-mail. "It's a significant economic opportunity for local workers, suppliers and contractors."

By the end of this year, Windsor is expected to have the fastgrowing metropolitan economy in the country, Dales said, quoting a prediction made earlier this year by the Conference Board of Canada.

While GDP (Gross Domestic Product") growth for the region was 3.5 per cent last year, it is expected to be 3.9 per cent this year, receiving a "big boost when the $1.6-billion Windsor-Essex Parkway begins later this year."

How big? "Well, do the math," Lyons says. "One-point-six billion, divided by 80. Those are big packages for everybody to bid on," he says of his members, some of whom have been dying for work in recent years.

About 20 per cent of work has already been awarded, according to Cindy Prince, communications director for Parkway Infrastructure Contractors, (PIC), the consortium building the project.

Among the local companies already doing work are Facca Inc., which two years ago started building the two lonely overpasses which have been sitting forlornly in the middle of a field near Howard Avenue since last fall.

Amico Infrastructures of Windsor has been awarded nearly 10 per cent of the overall work, in excavation and asphalt; demolition experts Jones Group Inc. of Windsor will be knocking down most of the homes and other remaining structures. In fact the job is bigger than the Jones group can handle alone - so they've subcontracted competitors Gagnon Demolition and Salvage, also of Windsor, to help. "They're going like bandits right now," Lyons said of the two.

This week Lepara Infrastructures Inc. started pulling up old parking lots and driveways along the route. Local landscapers Siefker Inc. have been hired for property maintenance; Black and MacDonald have been hired for much of the vast electrical work to be done on the site.

Hundreds of other contractors are in the process of filling out forms online to pre-qualify for the rest of the contracts. Each has to present proof of its financial wherewithal before they will even be considered.

About 400 new jobs have already been created by the parkway, Prince estimates, the first of about 3,500 people who will eventually have a hand in the project, working 12,000 jobyears between them.

At least 38 people employed by PIC or the Windsor Essex Mobility Group have bought homes or leased apartments in the area; hundreds more are expected to follow as hiring begins for such specialties as bridge design.

Area hotels and eateries are expected to be busier as out-of-town consultants from sound attenuation experts to pump salesmen start flooding in: the entire excavation will be designed to stay dry even through a 100-year storm.

As recently as 2007, building a flat, six-lane concrete 400 series highway through empty farmland cost about $19 million per kilometre to build, according to estimates prepared by the Ontario government - or more than $20 million today, given inflation in fuel costs alone.

The cost of building the below-grade Windsor-Essex Parkway, by comparison, will be about $133 million per km, or more than six times the cost of a surface road.

And that, Dales says, is the main reason the parkway will be by far the most expensive highway project in Ontario history and one of the most expensive ever built in Canada.

It won't be finished until September 2014, and along the way area residents can expect some major disruptions to their commuting routines, Lyons warns.

"There are going to be some inconveniences," Prince agreed. "There always are during construction." Chief among them will be the hammering associated with driving 5,600 steel pilings down to bedrock to support the 11 bridges and 11 tunnels that are the most complex components of the project.

Each structure will require three to six weeks of pile driving, all of which will be done during daylight hours. "We'll try not to make that a long steady month" of pile driving, Pierce says. Instead the hammering will be staggered, in some cases spaced it out over as much as six months per structure.

For construction geeks, Lyons advises checking out the parkway's official website at www.weparkway.ca, paying careful attention to the video flyovers.

"They're great - they you give you a helicopter view," Lyons said Thursday. "You can see exactly all the changes their making to the existing landscape - and it's incredible."

And don't expect to see the project ramp up slowly, he said. "I'm told they plan to hit it at all areas, all the time," he says of the 12-km-long project. "They don't have time to stage it - they're doing it all at once."

-----

Link: http://www.windsorstar.com/news/Park...672/story.html
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  #27  
Old Posted Aug 13, 2011, 10:54 PM
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They're doing a three-part series on it. Another huge article in the paper today.
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  #28  
Old Posted Aug 19, 2011, 6:18 AM
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Groundbreaking ceremony was today.

I will laugh my head off if a new crossing deal isn't reached by the time the freeway's done. The "highway to nowhere" will then become a reality.
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  #29  
Old Posted Aug 19, 2011, 2:59 PM
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If the new crossing isn't built right away, then the parkway will just exit onto Huron Church Rd and continue on to the Ambassador Bridge.
A road to nowhere, it will never be.
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  #30  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2011, 6:58 AM
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Courtesey of http://www.weparkway.ca













Demolition of the North Talbot bridge is where things started.

courtesey of www.windsorite.ca









This will be great to watch the progress.
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  #31  
Old Posted Aug 21, 2011, 5:08 PM
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It definitely won't be a road to nowhere - this will take traffic off Huron Church Road for 8 km (I don't know why they keep calling it the W-E Parkway since it's just an extension of Highway 401). It will also have a ramp to Ojibway Parkway and E.C. Row Expressway therefore greatly improving traffic flow for commuters in the west and south sides of the city.
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  #32  
Old Posted Aug 23, 2011, 3:02 PM
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It's called the Windsor-Essex Parkway because it's a completely different design from the rest of the 401, plus it's an actual parkway, not just a highway.
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  #33  
Old Posted Aug 23, 2011, 3:46 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by north 42 View Post
It's called the Windsor-Essex Parkway because it's a completely different design from the rest of the 401, plus it's an actual parkway, not just a highway.
Parkways are hard to define, but they usually imply having grass or parkland in the median. They can also have signalized intersections and prohibit trucks. 401 is a heavy truck route do this doesn't make sense.

Upon completion the 401 will now have 3 other names:
-Macdonald-Cartier Freeway (entire length)
-Highway of Heroes (Highway 404/DVP to Trenton)
-Windsor-Essex Parkway (US border to Highway 3)

Enough already? This is getting out of hand. The project could have been called the Windsor-Essex Parkway, but it shouldn't be named as such in my opinion.
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  #34  
Old Posted Aug 23, 2011, 8:12 PM
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I'v always understood that a parkway was a highway surrounded by parkland, not in the median
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  #35  
Old Posted Aug 24, 2011, 12:54 AM
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  #36  
Old Posted Aug 24, 2011, 1:52 AM
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north 42, but what about Lauzon Parkway on Windsor's east side? Around here it just seems to mean a road with a speed limit of 70km/h or more.

They should just just call the whole damn thing "Highway 401" and while they're at it, designate the EC Row Expressway with an actual provincial highway number like every other expressway in Ontario, and improve the signage there up to provincial standards.
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  #37  
Old Posted Aug 24, 2011, 2:25 AM
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EC Row isn't owned by the province. I can't get a number, unless Windsor gives it one, and I bet the MTO would oppose that.

Signage should be improved regardless. There should be some sort of provincial programme to help the medium cities like Windsor improve their signage, especially when the city is a gateway to the country.
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  #38  
Old Posted Aug 24, 2011, 5:22 AM
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Hmmm, I thought it still had a 'secret number' depsite the fact that the province dumped responsibility for it.

Canada's mid-sized cities would have much better freeway systems if they were in the U.S...our highways are embarrasing compared to theirs. Then there are cities like London that don't even have anything that so obviously need something!
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  #39  
Old Posted Aug 24, 2011, 3:00 PM
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Yeah, i don't really get why Lauzon parkway is called a parkway, to me it's just a regular road, definately not a highway.
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  #40  
Old Posted Aug 24, 2011, 3:03 PM
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It is surprising that London never built an expressway, I can't even imagine not having the E C Row Expressway to get across Windsor. It must be frustrating for Londoners to deal with.
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