History
The history of the E.C. Row Expressway dates back to January 1963, when the City of Windsor and the Department of Highways released a report called The Windsor Area Transportation Study (WATS). One of the primary issues identified by the study was "a limited and inadequate street network in the east-west direction generally resulting from several railway barriers." Properties were purchased along E.C. Row Avenue and the Third Concession beginning in 1958 for what was then intended as a two lane road linking Highway 18 with Highway 39 (which became Highway 2 in 1970). However, with the release of WATS and the subsequent amalgamation in 1966 in which Windsor annexed portions of the surrounding townships, plans for an expressway along the corridor were first conceived. The original plans for the expressway dating back to 1969 were for it to travel from current County Road 22, heading west along the southern edge of Belle River and Tecumseh, meeting up with the current two-lane freeway alignment (Pike Creek Bypass) just east of Puce, continuing as a freeway (without traffic lights at intersections, but with interchanges), and south through Lasalle down to just north of Amherstburg.
Due to costs and chronic labour strikes during the expressway's construction, the last section (from Ojibway Parkway to Huron Church Road) was finished in 1983 (as a two-lane freeway which was twinned in 1989), but completely opened as a two-lane freeway in 1986 (so work on the interchange with Huron Church Road could be completed), and is the only part of the freeway (other than from Lauzon Parkway east to Banwell Road) that is up to proper 400-Series Highway standards.
On May 7, 1986, the final contracts to complete the expressway began. Overpasses were yet to be constructed at Huron Church Road and Dominion Boulevard, and traffic was
On April 1, 1997, the province fully transferred ownership and responsibility for the route to the City of Windsor.
Read more about this topic: E. C. Row Expressway
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,—for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)