Guest column: Make ‘The Gordie’ a bridge to better cycling in Windsor

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By: Christopher Waters

In 1897, a guidebook of the Michigan Division of the League of American Wheelmen advised cyclists on how to access Canadian cities and towns, including Tecumseh, Chatham and Amherstburg.

The starting point was the same for all the Canadian destinations: “leave Detroit by Woodward Avenue. Take Ferry to Windsor (fare, five cents).” Canadian recreational cyclists similarly took their bikes on the ferry over to Detroit.

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So too did hundreds of cycle commuters. Detroiters and Windsorites were members of each other’s cycling clubs, raced together and even manufactured together. Evans & Dodge (of Dodge Brothers fame) built bikes right beside the ferry dock in Windsor.

Despite this promising start, our joint cycleways were kneecapped with the closure of the Ambassador Bridge to pedestrians and cyclists in 1982. With a Cold War reference, the Windsor Star quipped that, “it’s been called the world’s longest undefended border. But for pedestrians and bicyclists the U.S.-Canada boundary now resembles an iron curtain.”

Although Transit Windsor has provided a partial workaround in recent years, the tunnel has also been closed to cyclists and pedestrians seeking direct access. At the same time as bikes were banned on our international crossings, efforts were made — sometimes deliberately, and sometimes under well-intentioned, if misguided, safety initiatives — to squeeze bikes off the roads of the “motor cities.”

Until the bike boom of the 1970s, these efforts were almost successful. Thankfully, cycling in general in our region did pick up in the following decades, but cross-border cycling has generally involved putting your bike on a car and driving over the border.

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The potential benefits of the multi-use path on the coming Gordie Howe International Bridge have been widely touted. Among other things, we have been given a once-in-a-generation opportunity to restart cross-border cycle tourism in our region in a meaningful way.

At last month’s State of the Strait conference, a binational conference held every two years, speakers from both sides of the border focused on the potential for cross-border trail tourism. They include better health and air quality, visitor dollars, and a chance to highlight the rich natural and human heritage of the Detroit River for those in and beyond our region.

Will we take the opportunity? Hopefully.

Detroit has an extensive and continually growing network of greenways and other forms of cycling infrastructure, including the 47-km Joe Louis Greenway currently under construction. The draw in that direction, for Windsorites, is clear.

What about getting our neighbours here? Will they find safe and attractive cycle routes beyond our incredible waterfront?

They will find some. There also some frustrating gaps in our network, however, which will leave cyclists — especially those who feel vulnerable on our roads — reluctant to explore what our city and region has to offer. Progress on the Windsor side towards implementing the Active Transportation Master Plan remains slow, though the numbers who turn out for Open Streets suggest that Windsorites crave being out on foot or on two or three wheels.

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Unfortunately, rather than encouraging efforts in Windsor and other municipalities to make cycling an important part of the transportation mix for recreation and daily living alike, the Province of Ontario is attempting to quash the development of cycle paths.

Proposed legislation will not only require municipalities to seek permission to remove a lane of motorized traffic for purposes of building a bikeway, but will allow the province to order the removal of existing bike lanes.

Leaving aside questions of provincial overreach, the environmental, health, and equity benefits of cycling are ignored in this proposal. So too is the simple math that people on bikes take up less space than people in cars.

Bicycles and other forms of micro-mobility will have to be part of the congestion solution. Finally, and particular to our region, efforts to put roadblocks in the path of cycling threaten to undermine the potential catalytic benefits of The Gordie’s multi-use path.

If it is to be more than a novelty, the bridge bikeway has to be a path to safe cycling on both sides of the river.

Windsor’s Christopher Waters, author of Every Cyclist’s Guide to Canadian Law, is a University of Windsor law professor. He gave the keynote address, ‘Cycling the Border Through Time,’ at the Oct. 22, 2024, State of the Strait conference in Windsor.

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