Ontario revealed more details Friday on how it plans to twin the Garden City Skyway over the Welland Canal, targeting a starting construction date of 2026.
The project, first detailed in the spring of 2022, aims to ease gridlock between provincial border crossings and the Greater Golden Horseshoe.
A new 2.2-kilometre-long bridge would be built north of the existing thoroughfare and connect St. Catharines with Niagara-on-the-Lake.
An estimated 100,000 drivers and commercial vehicles use the current route every day.
Minister of Infrastructure Kinga Surma characterized the project as a “critical corridor expansion” with an estimated $1 trillion worth of goods travelling over the current bridge annually.
“We have issued a request for proposals to five teams for the first phase of work, marking another milestone in our plan to keep goods and people moving across southwestern Ontario,” Surma revealed during a press conference in St. Catharines Friday morning.
The province first began looking at the potential expansion of the skyway in 2010.
In 2020, the ministry unveiled the first elements of a twinning project after assessing the potential expropriation of properties and relocation of utilities.
The skyway twinning was part of the 2022 provincial budget in a $25.1-billion plan to better road, bridge and highway projects across Ontario over the next decade.
The twinning is expected to take about four years to complete and seeks to add a new four-lane bridge to handle Toronto-bound traffic, while the restored existing bridge will be for Niagara-bound vehicles.
Procurement and design is expected to begin in 2025, with construction starting the following year.
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