Its towers will also be the tallest bridge on the continent by quite a bit. Anyway, the U.S. side held its official groundbreaking yesterday, though prep work has been ongoing for months, now.
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On Tuesday, government officials from Washington, Ottawa, Lansing, Detroit and Windsor gathered in a weedy, dusty lot in the Delray neighborhood to mark the launch of work on the Detroit site of the bridge. The work is in preparation for full-scale construction of the bridge expected to start as soon as the first week of October. Along with the bridge, there will be a 167-acre U.S. customs plaza that will spread from the bridge’s footprint.
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Quote:
The planned Gordie Howe bridge across the Detroit River will be the longest "cable-stayed" bridge in North America at 2,798 feet, A cable-stayed bridge has one or more towers from which cables support the bridge deck. A distinctive feature of such bridges is the cables form a fan-like pattern. The span will connect Detroit and Windsor by linking Interstate 75 and Interstate 96 in Michigan with the new extension of Highway 401 in Ontario.
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If I have any problem with it it's the big-@ss port-of-entry on the American side which essentially splits Delray in half. It's not like there was a whole heckuva lot there to begin with, but it's going to make sure the entry feels very low-intensity and not particularly urban. I do wonder if all we'll see are some suburban-styled industrial parks pop up around the plaza in the years to come. Because that's about all I imagine will ever be built around that way, now.
Just kind of wish they'd have been a bit more pro-active in streamlining the the American plaza, but that's literally my only gripe. I'm loving the multi-use path on the north side of the bridge. The cyclist community in Detroit fought really hard for it and never let up on MDOT or the bridge authority for the long duration of the planning of the bridge.