Rt. Hon. Herb Gray Parkway featured in Canadian Consulting Engineer magazine

An economic corridor, the Rt. Hon. Herb Gray Parkway, is 11 km of below-grade (underground) international highway, an at-grade (ground-level) local service road network, and includes approximately 20 km of multi-use trails and 300 acres of green space. The project, completed in 2014, was featured in the March/April 2016 edition of Canadian Consulting Engineer (CCE) magazine.

The parkway is the access road component of a new end-to-end transportation system through Windsor and Essex County in southwestern Ontario, Canada. The corridor is Canada’s busiest land border crossing and carries approximately one-third of the trade between Canada and the U.S. with up to 11,000 transport trucks per day crossing the existing bridge.

Hatch was the lead designer on the C$1.4 billion design-build-finance-maintain project, which was undertaken by the Windsor Essex Mobility Group.

Green space was maximized and road operations were kept open during construction, with limited low-time closures. The 300 acres of green space was designed to include logical connections, creating a “road-in-a-park”, minimizing the impact of a major international highway through an urban center. In order to do so, while connecting communities on either side of an existing at-grade roadway, the Highway 401 portion of the parkway was built about 8 n below grade, facilitated through deep earth berms and retaining walls, through 11 tunnels, and under six bridges.

More than 26 lane-kilometres of road diversions were constructed north and south of the construction corridor to keep traffic moving. Construction time was also shortened through innovative approaches related to soil improvements for the foundations and backfill for the retaining walls along the buried section of the roadway.

Read CCE’s full feature, written by Hatch employees Biljana Rajlic, Svetozar Majstorovic, and Andrew Lambert, here.