The objectives of this research are to understand the economic importance of border bridges on the U.S.-Canada economies, especially involving the various US states proximate to the Province of Ontario, and to simulate various the U.S.-Canada border bridge policy and security scenarios. To this end, we will develop a novel bi-national transportation-combined economic simulation model which contributes to providing hierarchical economic impacts at the state/province or lower levels of the two countries. Complex and disaggregated models can lead to a better understanding of how economic impacts resulting from traffic pattern changes on the border bridges can affect the local economies of neighboring states in the United States. Combining models and data from the two countries, this project will bring methodological innovations in border security and freight transportation modeling.

We propose an integrated transportation-economic model that involves several sub-procedures to be developed. We suggest envision two major steps, although each step involves several modeling procedures. The first part is to construct a hierarchical structure of a bi-national economic simulation model. The second step is to add the U.S. and Canada highway system simulation model which is at the basis of the network user equilibrium concept.

Our scenario based simulation will include increased border security levels, capacity increases/decreases on various bridges, closures/demolitions of the bridges, and even the introduction of new bridges. The proposed research will estimate the changes of freight transportation costs and patterns, analyzing the structural changes in economic activities of each state/province by industrial sectors under various scenarios.

This research proposal is important not only for an increased understanding of the economic implication of the US-Canada border bridges, but also able to provide a simulation tool which can be extended and applied to other contexts, such as transportation, national and bi-national security, and Niagara Falls tourism policy simulations, among others. To effectively conduct this research, we made a multi-disciplinary (Economic Modeling; Law and Planning; Industrial Engineering; Supply Chain Management) and multi-campus research team (University at Buffalo and SUNY Oswego). Especially, the team will actively collaborate with a Canadian cross-border research group who already has communicated with the research team several times (http://www.uwindsor.ca/crossborder/).