University of Windsor

On the last day of our trip, we met Prof. Bill Anderson and his colleagues and students at University of Windsor. Professor Anderson is affiliated with Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Department of Political Science, and his research examines border crossing issues not only from transportation aspect, but also from economic and political aspects.

We started our meeting with Prof. Goodchild giving a presentation on Pacific Highway Border Crossing Commercial Vehicle Operations. Then each attendee introduced their research focuses. Professors and students from University of Windsor have a variety of research interests in border facilities, loop detector operations, roundabout design, and the impact of truck traffics on congestions, and so on. Later Prof. Anderson presented his research on the Border and Ontario Economy. He introduced that Ontario has an export-oriented economy, with most export goods transported by trucks and highly dependent on critical infrastructure. He also discussed the border crossing costs, supply chain risk in Auto industry resulted from uncertain border crossing time, and strategies utilized to mitigate such uncertainty. He also gave another presentation on infrastructure issues with border crossing: A second Windsor-Detroit Bridge? He talked about the public-private partnership model for building a second Windsor-Detroit Bridge and the funding issues from US government.