Three reasons the Gordie Howe Bridge is worth a fight

Editor’s note: This story first appeared in Stephen Henderson’s “I Have Questions” Substack. Henderson is the founder and executive advisor for BridgeDetroit.

It has been at least a 14-year journey from concept to almost-open for the Gordie Howe Bridge across the Detroit River.

Fourteen years of forging an unusual deal, wrangling state, federal and international bureaucracy, community negotiations and input, and a painstaking, arduous site preparation and construction.

No shock, then, that backs are up over a threatened delay to the bridge opening from President Donald Trump, at the last minute.

I’ll leave it to others to unpack the politics of the president conditioning the bridge opening (scheduled for later this year) to a resolution of his trade beefs with Canada.

But let’s talk policy. And facts.

The compelling reasons for this bridge, and the journey we took to get here, mean we can’t lose the moment.

Time and effort

As I point out above, this project has been around 14 years in the making, and there was nothing foregone about it from the beginning.

By way of reference, it took only about three and a half years to build the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco — in the 1930s during the Great Depression.

The Mighty Mack which spans the straits between Michigan’s lower and upper peninsula, was a 4-year project — in the 1950s.

The Gordie Howe is a 21st-century international crossing, and a sweeping endeavor whose size and scale overwhelm the logistics and planning necessary for other historical examples. Its design mandated the construction of 12 other highway-crossing bridges, just on the American side.

When Republican Gov. Rick Snyder began pushing the idea of a second bridge across the river at the Mackinac Policy Conference in 2011, he met immediate blowback: from the Moroun family that owns the Ambassador Bridge, which has been the only above-water crossing of the Detroit River since the 1930s; and from his own party in the state legislature.

Snyder’s solution was creative, elegant and risky: He forged an agreement between Michigan and Canada that avoided using state funds. Canada agreed to fund the bridge construction and recoup its costs through tolls. Canada’s contribution would leverage billions in federal support, so the project wouldn’t need Michigan money.

That was in 2012, and it still took six more years to get to the point of site preparation and land acquisition. It took another year after that to get a bill through Congress to pay for the U.S.-side customs plazas.

Then the pandemic struck and delays pushed the beginning of actual construction to 2022. The very fact that construction crews physically completed the span last year is a moment of uncanny and tremendous success that can’t reasonably be set aside.

And now here we are, just months from the opening of the bridge.

More delays disrespect the uncanny and tremendous will and effort that brought us this far. So many times, we’ve tripped over our own feet while walking toward progress. This time, we’ve gotten it right, finally.

There’s no way it makes sense to derail us when we’re this close.

The need for two

Since the Ambassador Bridge was constructed in 1931, the Detroit River has had just one over-water car crossing to Canada.

It’s nowhere near enough.

Just for comparison, let’s talk about Buffalo, another city that sits across from Canada. The Buffalo metro area population is a quarter the size of Detroit’s, and while it is home to a growing economy in health care and technology, it is dwarfed by Detroit’s automotive and related technology sectors.

But Buffalo has five spans across the Niagara River; some carry cars, some carry trains, and one does both.

Here, the Ambassador is complemented by the Windsor Tunnel, a two-lane underwater crossing that’s not accessible to much of the truck traffic that crosses every day, and a second, rail-only bridge.

Detroit is the nation’s busiest northern border crossing, and that fact alone supports the idea for the Gordie Howe Bridge.

The Ambassador handles 8,800-10,000 trucks a day, but dumps them out on the Canada side on busy streets, causing serious congestion. On the Detroit side, the bridge connects to a recent project that is supposed to expedite traffic to nearby highways, but the volume still causes back-ups and delays.

The Gordie Howe will add crucial capacity — a 1.5-mile span with six lanes and dedicated pedestrian and bike paths. And its location, along with the construction of critical highway access infrastructure, will change the picture considerably on both sides of the border.

Beyond trade, the second span will boost U.S. security concerns: It is wildly unlikely that two bridges could fail simultaneously.

And its public ownership — shared between Canada and the United States — contrasts importantly with the Ambassador’s private structure. The Ambassador is the only international crossing in the world that’s privately owned. That means at any time, its owners can put their interests above the public’s, which is inherently dangerous.

Money, money, money

The Ambassador Bridge is losing trade traffic, which means Detroit and the region are losing our trade advantage.

With the auto industry’s needs, and the opportunity for growth in logistics, just-in-time delivery and other 21st-century economic developments, the Gordie Howe represents the best option to reclaim what’s slipping away.

In 2024, the Ambassador recorded one of its worst years in incoming and overall truck traffic, according to federal data and the Bridge and Tunnel Operators Association, which tracks traffic in Detroit.

Traffic has been moving from the 83-year-old Ambassador Bridge to the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron, which saw traffic grow 35% between 2023 and 2025. It’s 90 minutes away from Detroit, but the added distance is becoming preferable to dealing with the Ambassador’s shortcomings: long lines, high tolls, difficult transitions to highways on both sides of the border.

Port Huron isn’t outfitted to deal well with the jump in traffic, either. Back-ups sometimes stretch to 20 miles, and a planned investment in infrastructure to deal with growing capacity is years away.

The Gordie Howe was constructed explicitly to ease trade across the border, and to grow it. That’s why the Canadian government agreed to foot the bill for the bridge, and why political leadership on the American side worked so hard, and so long, to get it built.

We’ve already spent the political capital. Canada has already spent the money. The steel is already in the air.

The only question left is whether we are serious about being the economic gateway we say we are.