Ontario’s record-breaking $6.4 billion border bridge stuns in new video footage

Ontario and Michigan now share the honours of hosting the largest cable-stayed bridge in North America after the new $6.4 billion Gordie Howe International Bridge reached its long-anticipated connection this summer.

The impressive U.S.-Canada border crossing has generated plenty of excitement since its June 2018 construction start, and after six years of work, the two sides of the bridge — constructed in tandem by U.S. and Canadian crews — finally met over the Detroit River last month.

It marked the single-biggest milestone in the project’s construction to date, and officially thrust it into the history books as the longest clear span of any cable-stayed bridge in North America, with a record length of 853 metres or 0.53 miles.

But construction is far from complete, and there is still much work to do before the bridge opens in 2025, officially closing a gap in the continent’s busiest international trucking corridor and linking Ontario’s Highway 401 to Michigan’s I-75.

As work presses forward, the bridge team has been sharing regular photo and video updates documenting this historic infrastructure project’s realization. The latest such update offers stunning aerial footage showing the bridge as of July 2024.

Drone-captured clips show off not just the colossal bridge structure with its six-lane road deck, 220-metre-tall support towers, and 216 stay cables, but also the rapid growth of supporting infrastructure like the approach ramps and border ports of entry.

The Gordie Howe Bridge is set to open to international traffic in September 2025 — a full ten months after its initially planned completion date in 2024.