A Shuttle That Never Returned Kept Runners in Windsor Out of the Detroit Free Press Marathon

Some runners who planned to reach the Detroit Free Press Marathon from the Canadian side of the river spent the morning of Sunday, Oct. 18, at a bus stop in downtown Windsor, Ont., waiting for a shuttle that was never coming back for them. The Linq Tunnel Bus, which shuttles race-day passengers under the Detroit River, says the tunnel had already been shut to its driver by the time he tried to return for a second load, CTV News Windsor first reported.

By the company’s account, its first bus pulled away from the corner of Bruce Avenue and Riverside Drive West at about 5:15 a.m. with more than 70 passengers and carried them across to Detroit. Closed roads and security checkpoints slowed the return to Windsor, and by 5:53 a.m., the company says, tunnel staff had told the driver it was too late: the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel was shut, 22 minutes ahead of its scheduled 6:15 a.m. closure, which ended any chance of a second trip. The Linq has apologized for leaving people at the stop without any word, and says it is looking again at how it warns passengers when a trip goes wrong.

The Windsor transport page on the marathon’s own website had told runners the shuttles would start at 5:15 a.m., with the final bus leaving at 6:15 a.m. “sharp,” the same minute the tunnel was due to close to vehicles. International marathon and half-marathon corrals opened at 6:15 and closed at 6:55, and the race’s FAQ says in capital letters that there are no late starts.

A runner identified only as Nicole told CTV News Windsor she got to the stop at about 5:30 a.m. and found at least 30 to 40 people already waiting. The Linq’s website said the shuttle might be late and told riders to wait for it, so she did, until 6:45, just 15 minutes before the start, with no bus, no update and no way left across the border.

“You psych yourself up, you do all this preparation to get ready for it, and you get there, everybody’s excited, they’re ready to go, and you keep looking down the street to see if the bus is coming,” she said. Being left with no information was what frustrated her most. “If they would have sent maybe a courier or someone else just to let us know, people could have gotten their cars and boogied over there and got there on time.”

Nicole had taken the Linq to last year’s race with no trouble, when the service was barely two weeks old. Transit Windsor ran the tunnel bus for decades before the city shut it down in 2025, after Mayor Drew Dilkens used his strong-mayor powers to veto a council vote to keep it, citing the cost of federal labor rules that give cross-border transit workers 10 paid sick days, CBC News reported. The Linq started running on Oct. 6, 2025, picking up at the Bruce Avenue corner. A month later it was answering for concertgoers left in Detroit after a Jonas Brothers show, when the return bus pulled out five minutes before the concert ended, and chief executive Dhar Bhella told AM800 the company would look at fixed departure times and a bus-tracking app.

Sunday’s race drew about 30,000 people across its events, roughly 3,000 of them Canadian, and its international full and half-marathon both sold out. The Detroit Free Press Marathon is one of the largest races in the United States, and its course leaves the U.S. over the Ambassador Bridge about 2 miles in and comes back under the river through the tunnel. At the front, Andy Bowman won his third straight title in an unofficial 2:12:11, taking 56 seconds off the course record Greg Meyer had held since 1980.

Aaron Velthoven, the event’s vice-president, said organizers are looking into what went wrong and want to hear from the runners it cost a race, though nothing has been said yet about what they might be offered. Entry fees are non-refundable under the event’s terms, even when a runner cannot take part, and the deadline to defer an entry to 2027 passed on Oct. 7. Runners who missed the start are being asked to write to the race at support@freepmarathon.zendesk.com.