FINDINGS:

TOTAL TIME SPENT CROSSING BRIDGES: 3 MINS, 43 SECONDS. (Not counting Niagara bridge waiting time which was part of customs line.)

TOTAL TIME SPENT TALKING TO CUSTOMS AGENTS:  180 SECONDS. 45 seconds per.

TOTAL TIME WAITING IN LINE FOR CUSTOMS:  Canadian customs: 25 mins. USA customs: 1 hour, 5 mins.

NOTE: on none of the four customs crossings did we wait due to insufficient carrying capacity of the bridge. On each crossing, the bridge could have been 90 lanes wide each way, and we still would have waited at customs. At US customs.

CONCLUSIONS:

Whatever solution is or is not devised for any downriver bridge between Detroit and Canada, unless you can reduce the waiting time for US customs, any money spent on any span will not shorten the wait times, relieve congestion, ignite a manufacturing renaissance, or make me want to shoot over to Windsor for a couple of hours to legally smoke Cuban cigars. The bottleneck is not bridge capacity, but customs--US customs. Without speeding up the time spent in customs--US customs-- the rest is just what nous amis Quebecois would call silly merde.  C'est vrai, mon vieux!

And if you really want to save hundreds of millions of dollars, just mandate that if a customs transaction takes longer than 45 seconds, pull whatever it is out of the line and send it to Zug Island.