Would you be in favor of a freeway bridge over Lake Erie to Chatham-Kent? (Cleveland: public transportation, design)

[no1brownsfan]

A ferry would be better.

[RaisedRustbelt]

I originally voted for the bridge because I would like a shorter route , but I rather it be a ferry. It would be a quickest and easiest solution.

[ess.ess.ess.esq.]

until the early 1950s, there were many , many passenger ships and ferries on Lake Erie----the superhighways ended that...Governor Rhodes used to talk in the 1960s about "a bridge to Canada"....it never happened

[SquareBetterThanAll]

Originally Posted by foreverdublin21

Well, I have a friend who lives there, and I came to learn that it's a fairly large city off of Lake Erie.

Chatham-Kent (2011 population 103,671) is a single-tier municipality in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Mostly rural, its centres of population are Blenheim, Chatham, Dresden, Ridgetown, Tilbury and Wallaceburg.

Area[1]
• Land 2,458.09 km2 (949.07 sq mi)

Population (2011)[1]
• Municipality 103,671 (Ranked 50th)
• Density 42.2/km2 (109/sq mi)
• Urban 44,074 (Chatham)
10,163 (Wallaceburg)
4,563 (Blenheim)


104,000 people spread across 949 square miles with a density of 109 people per square mile. That would literally be a bridge or ferry to nowhere. Might as well build a bridge to Amish Country; that has the same density as Holmes County.

[DSS94]

There is nowhere near enough justification to build what would be world's longest road bridge for the amount of traffic between Cleveland and Ontario. A ferry would definitely be a better option.

[Linda_d]

I don't think a bridge over Lake Erie would be feasible. I'm sure one could be built with enough money, but a 50 mile stretch of bridge with no services and no alternative route would be a disaster waiting to happen IMO.

At various times, there's been talk about ferries over Lakes Erie and Ontario here in New York. There was some talk of a ferry between Dunkirk, NY and Port Colburne, ON a few years that came to nothing. A company actually tried to get a ferry service going between Rochester, NY and Toronto, ON, within the last decade but they had mechanical troubles with the actual ferry boat(s) and possibly financial woes, and shut down soon after opening.

I think that some of the issues with ferries on either Erie or Ontario is that they would require:

• large ferry boats to make the trips safe
• lots of traffic to make them affordable
• lots of scheduled trips to make them convenient
• customs stations at either end.

PS... If you'd like to take a much shorter ride on a much smaller car ferry, the historic Stowe Ferry across Chautauqua Lake in the southwestern corner of NYS runs on the weekends in the summer for donations. The ferry has been in operation since the early 1800s and was the only way to cross Chautauqua Lake until the I-86 bridge was built back in the 1980s.

[Cleveland_Collector]

It's all about purpose, trip duration, and destination. The purpose would only be for passenger vehicles as the commercial shipping routes are already there. If Toronto was located across the lake, a bridge or large ferry service would probably make commercial sense. Right now, anyone from NEO can get to Toronto in 5.5 hours by car (Windsor in about 3.5 hours). A 50 mile ferry ride would likely take around 2 hours. The remaining trip from Chatham-Kent to Toronto would take another 3 hours. So, maybe you would save 0.5-1 hour maximum on a ferry to either city and that doesn't really even consider wait times, loading and unloading times, inevitable weather delays, customs, costs, etc. The bottom line is that either idea is an expensive proposition and their benefits, at least at present, would be far outweighed by the costs.

I think that if anything is tried, it should be a light ferry service of around 2 trips per day to see if the idea has any traction.

[billmesh]

No chance on the bridge, and I really think the ferry would be a failure. Are there that many people clamoring to go to Chatham? Or are there that many people from Chatham excited about the idea of coming to Cleveland? If anything, I would say the Ferry MIGHT have decent ridership very very early on... but ultimately that would taper very quickly and it would eventually die.

[SquareBetterThanAll]

Originally Posted by billmesh

No chance on the bridge, and I really think the ferry would be a failure. Are there that many people clamoring to go to Chatham? Or are there that many people from Chatham excited about the idea of coming to Cleveland? If anything, I would say the Ferry MIGHT have decent ridership very very early on... but ultimately that would taper very quickly and it would eventually die.

It wouldn't be a much of a timesaver to get to Detroit or Toronto. I don't see why there would be any demand to expedite travel to rural Ontario. It doesn't make any sense.

[that412]

What about sending it somewhere like Port Stanley, which is already an established little beach town, and is about 25 miles south of a fairly substantial city in London?