Gordie Howe International Bridge Opens to Traffic Monday, Nearly a Decade After Construction Began

A new road, eight years in the making

Traffic starts crossing the Gordie Howe International Bridge at 12 p.m. Monday, July 27, according to ClickOnDetroit. The bridge connects I-75 in Detroit to Highway 401 in Ontario. It's the first new bridge crossing between Michigan and Ontario in more than 60 years.

Construction started in 2018. That's roughly eight years from groundbreaking to open traffic lanes. Canada held its own celebration first: a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Windsor on July 24, according to the Associated Press, with an official opening ceremony on the Windsor side at 11:30 a.m. that day, according to ClickOnDetroit.

Walkers and cyclists don't get access right away. The toll-free multi-use path opens Wednesday, Aug. 5, more than a week after vehicle traffic starts moving, according to ClickOnDetroit.

Who actually paid for this

Michigan and Canada jointly own the bridge, but Canada paid almost the entire bill, according to ClickOnDetroit. A foreign government financed a multibillion-dollar piece of American infrastructure because it was in Canada's economic interest to do it.

Why would Canada foot that bill? Because the existing crossings, the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, are private and semi-private chokepoints for a trade relationship worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Canada wanted a public alternative it controlled, and it paid to build one rather than wait around for Washington and Lansing to split costs on a project neither government was rushing to fund. By a trading partner's logic, this move protects its own supply chain, and taxpayers on this side of the border got a public crossing they didn't have to pay for.

The bridge specs and the toll math

The structure itself is substantial. Six bridge lanes, 16 toll lanes, 60 U.S. and Canadian inspection lanes, and towers standing 720 feet tall, among the tallest structures in the region, according to ClickOnDetroit. It's now the longest cable-stayed bridge in North America.

The toll pricing is where this matters for anyone who drives commercial freight across that river. With the Breakaway discount program, which lets vehicles pass through toll lanes without stopping to pay, the passenger vehicle toll on the new bridge is less than half the current price to cross the Ambassador Bridge or the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, according to ClickOnDetroit. Both of those older crossings raised their tolls this year.

That pricing gap matters because the Detroit-Windsor corridor carries an enormous share of all truck freight moving between the U.S. and Canada. Truckers who've been stuck paying rising tolls on the Ambassador Bridge, a privately owned span, now have a public option that costs less. ClickOnDetroit's own prior reporting flagged that the new bridge is expected to save truck drivers time and money at the border. Less time idling at a bottleneck, less money handed to a toll operator, more freight moving.

What the coverage leaves out

Both the Associated Press and the Washington Post ran nearly identical short items on this, framing the bridge mainly around trade, jobs and tourism. Neither dug into the toll comparison or the financing breakdown that ClickOnDetroit reported. The financing detail, Canada eating almost the entire cost, is arguably the most politically relevant fact in this story, and it got buried or omitted in the wire coverage that most national outlets ran.

What happens next

The bridge opens to vehicles at noon Monday. Full pedestrian and cyclist access follows more than a week later on Aug. 5. The open question now is how quickly freight volume shifts away from the Ambassador Bridge, owned by the Moroun family's Detroit International Bridge Company, and toward the new public crossing, and whether that pricing pressure forces the private operators to cut their own tolls to compete. No one has published projected traffic-shift numbers yet. Watch for those figures in the months ahead.