Brighton Beach East Parking Lot

Where was everybody at the Tunnel Plaza Information meeting? I attended at the Cleary at about 6 PM and stayed for about 2 hours, primarily because I was waiting to meet the Project Manager.

I saw the photo in the Star today about the session. One bureaucrat talking to another bureaucrat. Do you want to know why?

Perhaps there were about 10 or 15 people in total there during the period I was at the Cleary. We were outnumbered by people from the various Governments involved. I understood that an ad had been placed in the newspaper over a week ago to advertise about this session. However, I guess the City's letter writers were too tired after drafting all of those targetted letters for people on the DRIC corridor that they forgot to send out letters to people impacted by what was going to happen downtown. Or maybe because it was the City who seemed to be in the lead in this project and so wanted no one to attend. Who knows!

A few interesting things to me. Traffic was projected to grow by 50% from the present 6 million vehicles per year and that is one of the reasons we needed to spend the $30 million for an expanded plaza. For what it is worth, wasn't that the volume through the Tunnel back pre-September 11? Did they manage before with that volume?

I also noted that the Bridge Co's proposal for the Tunnel and how to handle traffic was not presented at all. I know it is not on the table, but do the EA rules require that all reasonable alternatives be examined? Wasn't that what the DRIC people told us? What happens if the Bridge Co. and Detroit re-negotiate their deal? Won't that impact tunnel traffic movements?

Mention was made that we had no control over what happened on the US side. It seemed to me though that the problem is booths and staffing just like at the Bridge. No matter what we did on our side, we could still have massive back-ups because traffic from Canada really only had a few booths to pass through. The obvious question was why not add a few booths and fully staff the booths on the US side similar to what happened at the bridge.

By golly, I remembered why this did not happen. Who was going to be the champion and do it the way the Bridge Co. did it at the bridge? The City of Detroit, the City of Windsor, DCTC? Who? This is a "public" crossing after all and being "public" is so much better than private isn't it? Well, perhaps not in this case.

The interesting question is whether there is room to expand on the US side anyway. They only have a 4.5 acre plaza and the cost to redevelop it is estimated at $US50-70 million.

Their time-table to ram this through is pretty aggressive too. A few months it seems. The less people know I guess, the less the complications for the Mayor and his ambition to own and operate and lease the Tunnel.

It seems to me that we are not building a Tunnel Plaza but just a huge parking lot to keep cars off of city streets. In other words, a Brighton Beach East parking lot for cars like the one proposed on the Horseshoe road. $30 million to pave a parking lot!