Columnists
A bridge too far?
It’s public infrastructure spending time again.
Wellington did pretty well last time around. I don’t think we’ll be quite as lucky this time. The major urban mayors are already twisting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s arm; Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto have all but been handed their cheques.
What we may be looking for, then, is a ‘knock one out of the park’ project that will show off the very best of Canadian design and engineering ingenuity. Like, um, well, how about a bridge across Lake Ontario from Wellington to Rochester—a distance of about 80 kilometres? To put that in perspective, the Confederation Bridge between Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island is 13 kilometres long. And the longest bridge in North America is the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in southern Louisiana, which clocks in at just less than 40 kilometres. So it would be a massive challenge. But Canadians are surely nothing if not resourceful (a word our Prime Minister himself uttered while in Switzerland, mingling with the rich and connected). Building the bridge would be a perfect opportunity to match rhetoric with action.
It would also be an economic winner. Think of all the traffic that has to get across Toronto on the 401 to make its way down to Niagara or Windsor in order to find its way across to the States. An eastern bridge from Wellington would suck up all that traffic and completely eliminate Toronto’s congestion problem, allowing everyone to work half an hour longer every day.
I grant you, the idea of a bridge faces a few obstacles. Could it be built high enough for lake freighters to fit underneath, or would a couple of spans need to open and close? Could it be built on a central axis, with the border access points changing like the hands of a clock? What would the Americans do with their half of the bridge: would they even want to build it? I know our Prime Minister has persuasive powers that he can exercise just by shaking his ringlet-laden locks and posing for a photograph with admirers, but this may be a tough sell.
So maybe we have to scale back our imaginative leap just a tiny bit. What is the next best thing to a bridge? Why, a pier. We could sidestep the American problem and build a pier out from Wellington that ended in Canadian waters. At about 40 kilometres, it would be by far the world’s longest, eclipsing the relatively puny two-kilometre long piece of engineering in Southendon- Sea, England. If building a bridge was technically possible, it ought to be possible to modify it ever-soslightly to create a pier. For example, Canadian engineers would surely be smart enough to include a turnaround loop at the very end. This might help ensure the flow of traffic did not become a little clogged. There could also be turnaround points at, say, five kilometre stages, and lookout points even more plentifully staged.
Just as the bridge would be a dead certainty in terms of producing an economic return, so too would a pier. Already, there are tens of thousands of tourists who come to the County to try out the Picton roundabout, and from an experiential standpoint, a pier would leave the roundabout in the dust. It would be a boon for local businesses. Picture the revenue to be hauled in by a souvenir booth selling T-shirts only available at the end of the pier. Or imagine a for-profit public washroom, gas pump or automotive repair shop on the pier, priced to reflect market conditions. Besides, there’s nothing to say we can’t charge tolls for using the pier. We could price the tolls creatively so that those turning back early or stopping at a lookout point would pay extra. And if we really wanted to make our money back quickly, we could always install slot machines or wina- big-teddy-bear arcade games along the pier. Or make the pier one giant LCBO store.
The name for our pier (or bridge) seems obvious: just find an appropriate legendary NHL star and it’s practically a done deal. After all, Windsor’s new international bridge is to be named the Gordie Howe; Maurice ‘Rocket’ Richard’s family could have had his name on Montreal’s new bridge, had they so desired. So, the Bobby Hull pier (or bridge) seems a great fit. Or, for that matter, Dennis, or Bobby and Dennis, or Dennis and Bobby. I’m not fussy.
So you think all of this international bridge or world’s longest pier business is dreaming in technicolour, do you? Well, I can think a little smaller. How about a pedestrian bridge in Wellington between the harbour and the tip of Sandbanks Provincial Park. Rounded to the nearest kilometre, it would be zero kilometres in length, and rounded to the nearest $10 million, it would cost nothing. (Actually, this was the idea I had wanted to put forward all along; I thought framing it as a compromise would make me seem more reasonable. But now that I’ve set out this pier idea, I’m inclined to think it’s too good to let go of.)
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