Sam Schwartz Engineering receives award from American Council of Engineering Companies

Sam Schwartz Engineering (SSE) was recently awarded the Diamond Award for Engineering Excellence from the American Council of Engineering Companies. The award recognizes the Greenlink Windsor Transportation Land Use Planning project for demonstrating a high degree of achievement, value and innovation. The award is the highest honor given by the ACEC. As a result of receiving the Diamond Award by the by the ACEC New York Chapter, the Greenlink Windsor Project was then eligible to be considered in the ACEC national competition. The Canada-United States border crossing from Windsor, Ontario to Detroit, Michigan is a heavily traveled truck route. Currently, trucks travel on local roads as they pass through Windsor to get to one of two Detroit River crossings. To relieve some of this pressure, the Detroit River International Crossing (DRIC) team - a partnership between federal (Canada/United States) governments, provincial/state (Ontario/Michigan) governments, and their consultants - is planning a highway extension through Windsor that leads to a new bridge crossing to Detroit. While the DRIC team is primarily concerned with international trade needs, the City of Windsor is concerned with ensuring that their local, community needs are met. Our firm was retained by the City of Windsor to develop mitigations to the DRIC team's preferred option for the extension of Highway 401 through their city. If not designed carefully, DRIC's planned six-lane highway would tear through Windsor causing irreparable damage to the city fabric. Many cities are still wrestling with the negative aftermaths of similar highway construction. We investigated other cities' solutions to this problem and came up with many strong design examples. With these in mind, we decided that the swath of highway that will pass through Windsor should not be viewed as a highway to which the city must retrofit; instead it should be viewed as an extension of the city to which the highway should fit. The DRIC team agreed to entertain the idea of short tunnels over a depressed, open-cut highway for the extension. Taking this concept further, our firm introduced a solution and vision for Windsor that would minimize the highway's intrusion into communities along its path and maximize the cohesive potential of this six kilometer-long corridor. The design concept would add hundreds of acres of usable green space and provide an end-to-end pedestrian/bike path that would never cross a car at grade. The term GreenLink Windsor was conceived for this design to reflect the connections being made. Park spans would bridge not only the highway, but also its cross streets and, in some cases, access roads, linking communities that surround the highway. Input from the City of Windsor and the general public was crucial when determining the location and length of each park span/highway tunnel. Through presentations, public open houses, meetings with the Windsor City Council, and media interviews, we reminded the public that this is an extraordinary moment in the history of Windsor and the history of highway design. There is an opportunity to build on the foundation of the city and create a highway that is not only a way to transport people and goods, but a "gesture toward the public" (paraphrasing the architect Santiago Calatrava). Public and media responses have been overwhelmingly supportive of GreenLink Windsor. A Windsor Star article from November 2007 reported that in a public call-in survey, out of over 3,150 respondents, nearly 99 percent supported the GreenLink Windsor design. The City of Windsor is currently in discussions with the DRIC team regarding incorporating GreenLink Windsor into their highway design.