Local officials and developers have preached the same sermon for years: The Toledo area is ideally situated to become a major freight distribution center for the northeastern United States and southern Canada.
“Toledo has all of the elements to emerge as an international transportation, logistics, and distribution center — it’s a matter of strategic geography,” James Hartung, the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority’s president, told the Toledo Area Chamber of Commerce earlier this year.
“We really are at the crossroads at the North American trading and economic regime,” said John Austin, a research fellow at the Brookings Institution who has studied the economy of the Great Lakes region. “There aren’t many places on Earth that are at the center of this kind of economic flow.”
Critics in 2006 questioned why such a terminal couldn’t be developed on vacant industrial land in Toledo, or at Canadian National’s existing terminal, a traditional boxcar-sorting and train storage facility called Lang Yard, along I-75 between Alexis Road and I-280. The port authority’s Mr. Hartung said Lang could be a candidate if its obstacles can be overcome — notably, that it’s boxed in on one side by I-75 and on the other by Toledo’s Hoffman Road landfill.
http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080518/NEWS11/805180...
Wow this is weird, it seems like I've been talking about this since late April when Brian McMahon started to turn up the heat on this topic. Glad to see the Blade finallly catching up.
There have been discussions, meetings, studies, reviews and so on, for how many years?
And the assembled meeting attendees, politico's and others have been mulling the same studies, reviews and proposals for years.
Seems that the one stumbling block is the location of the city and its infrastructure, highway access, railway access and so on.
Seem to remember some state study with regards to I75 on and off ramps in the area and a reworking of the road way in the area.
Better planning then, would have helped us now, and into the future but here we are, and what do we do?
More studies and more meetings.