Thank you, Madam Chair.
An earlier question was put, I think, to Ron, about customs staffing in plazas. For our new span, the only thing we have to do is build the bridge. The new six-lane bridge will tie into the existing customs plaza. We are going to do some modifications to the Canadian CBSA commercial plaza.
Right now, a truck that has to get inspected has to be escorted four kilometres down the road to what they call an off-site facility, which obviously is a security issue. CBSA has asked for quite some time that we bring that back to the plaza, which we're going to do. That's one of the phases of the project.
There won't be any additional CBSA staffing required because the bridge just ties into the existing plaza. I was at the Blue Water Bridge for 10 years. We did the same thing when they twinned the bridge there. It tied into the existing customs plaza. That's why our project only costs $500 million to do, because it's just the bridge and the plaza.
Ron touched on a couple of things. I think there's something you should note about traffic volumes across the borders. We all belong to the Bridge and Tunnel Operators Association. There's a website, and all the stats are on there. We all contribute statistics to it. They're updated every month.
Just to let you know, in the period from the year 2000 to 2017, at our bridge, car traffic is down by 50%, and in the same time period, truck traffic is down by 27%. Ron alluded to some of the reasons for that with the shift in manufacturing. At the Ambassador Bridge, of course, we're heavily into the automotive sector. It's a big user of our bridge, whether it's a finished product or tier one, tier two, or tier three suppliers. That's pretty significant, and I think year-to-date, we're pretty well flat. For all the crossings, the bridge and tunnel operators of the Ontario-Michigan, Ontario-New York crossings, from 2000 to 2017, cars are down by 38% and trucks are down by 20%, so total traffic is down by about 35%.
Why is car traffic down? It's a combination of a few things. The western hemisphere travel initiative that the U.S. initiated in 2009 required you to have a passport or NEXUS. That cut out a lot of the spontaneous trips across the border, where somebody just wanted to go over for one concert or for dinner. If somebody travelling from the southern U.S. was in the Detroit area and thought, “Hey, let's go to Canada,” they likely didn't have a passport.
Interestingly enough, Canadians make up about 75% of the cross-border traffic in cars, so that affected a lot of the cross-border shopping. I know this because I have a wife and two daughters, and I live on the border. That was a big deal in the nineties, when we didn't have Target or Lowe's in Canada. Now we have all of those in Canada. The reason for going to the States was that you'd have that variety, and there were cheaper prices in the United States, too.
Of course, that fluctuates a lot with the Canadian dollar—whether it's down. I used to say if I go to Windsor and ask somebody what the exchange rate is, they'd probably tell me. If you go to Detroit and ask them, they'd say, “The exchange rate of what?” Canadians really keep an eye on that and they're very conversant in that.
At the Peace Bridge, in that time period, cars are down by 39% and trucks are down by 19%. At Queenston-Lewiston, cars are down by 27% and the trucks are down by 22%. Those are just some interesting trends.
Ron mentioned that it's not the lanes across the water that matter. That's really true. Mr. Comerford from CBSA said they have 13 lanes for trucks at the Ambassador Bridge coming into Canada. I'll tell you, when all those 13 lanes are open at the right time, I can go to sleep because the traffic is flowing well. If you shut down one lane, that's about 50 trucks per hour, which is just over a mile of trucks, that back up onto the highway.
These days, the backups that we do see—as other operators can tell you—are not so much because of volumes. There's not enough staffing. Computers go down. It's like when everybody's relying on going to the grocery store and a computer goes down. The little clerk there doesn't know how to count change because it's all done for them. They have to go into manual mode, which really slows things down a lot. Those things are causing us some concern.
In the Canadian government and the U.S. government, we've talked about the importance of trade for both countries. Talk the talk but walk the walk. Fund the CBSA whether it's for staffing or technology. Mr. Comerford talked about some of the new technologies we're testing at the Ambassador Bridge where trucks come into Canada.
He won't say these numbers, but I'll tell you. It takes about 60 seconds for a fast truck to clear primary inspection lines. This new secure corridor—and I've seen it in its early stages—takes about 23 seconds. You can get three trucks where just one could go before. It makes a huge difference. Plus it saves them on their staffing too. They save on their resources side by employing the technology and the trusted trader programs.
We work with all the border operators. We work with CBSA and CBP because we see things going both ways. We sit on a couple of task forces with each organization on how we can make things better at the border. We don't complain. Ron does his rants every once in a while, but we work with him on finding ways to shave a few seconds off each inspection. When you're doing 12,000 trucks and maybe 12,000 cars in a day at our place, it really makes a big difference.
Those are a couple things I wanted to pass on.