Tijuana detour: Southbound lanes at San Ysidro border crossing to be closed for 57 hours

San Diego Union-Tribune

Sept. 8, 2017 11:50 AM PT

San Ysidro, Calif. —

To anyone thinking of driving into Tijuana through San Ysidro a couple of weeks from now, the U.S. General Services Administration has some advice: Think again.

For a 57-hour period — from 3 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 23 until noon on Monday, Sept. 25 — the border will be closed to southbound vehicles.

The closure is needed as part of the GSA’s plan to realign the southernmost portion of Interstate 5, a project that launches the third and final phase of the $741-million expansion of the San Ysidro Port of Entry, the busiest land port in the Western Hemisphere.

“The traveling public has the ability to make this either an OK experience or a terrible experience,” Anthony Kleppe, a senior asset manager with the GSA, said Thursday during a news conference. “People need to plan ahead. This is not going to be a typical weekend.”

The final phase of the port’s reconstruction, scheduled for completion in June 2019, is expected to ease vehicle congestion at the border. Among the planned improvements are doubling the number of southbound vehicle lanes — from five to 10 — leading to Mexico’s border inspection facility at El Chaparral. Plans also call for eight additional northbound vehicle inspection lanes, for a total of 33.

During the shutdown, all southbound vehicle traffic into Tijuana will be routed down State Route 905 to the Otay Mesa port, nine miles to the east. But with only five Mexican inspection lanes, there likely will be a long wait.

“If people don’t alter their travel patterns, if everybody tries to head south in their car … then you can expect significant delays of an hour or more,” to get into Mexico through Otay, said Laurie Berman, Caltrans’ district director in San Diego.

Northbound traffic will not be affected by the operation. And the port’s two pedestrian facilities, northbound and southbound, will remain open.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, some 70,000 northbound passenger vehicle cross through San Ysidro on an average day; officials estimate the southbound flow is similar.

Following the shutdown, southbound drivers could still encounter some delays, particularly during rush-hour periods. As the project moves into its next phase, only three southbound lanes will feed into the El Chaparral Port of Entry, a reduction from five in the current configuration.

Once that phase is completed, there will be four lanes for the final 18 months of the project. But authorities hope to avoid any vehicle backlog through a redesigned, softer curve in the road that leads to Mexico’s inspection facility.

sandra.dibble@sduniontribune.com

Dibble writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune

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Sandra Dibble

Sandra Dibble covers the border and Mexico for The San Diego Union-Tribune. She was born in Egypt, raised in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, and has spent much of her career writing about international and multicultural topics. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Arabic from the University of Utah and a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. She spent a year on an international journalism fellowship in which she traveled and studied in Mexico. She worked at The Miami Herald for nearly a decade, specializing in coverage of the Cuban, Nicaraguan and Haitian communities, and was part of a team awarded the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for uncovering the Reagan administration’s clandestine support of the Nicaraguan Contras. She spent three years at The National Geographic, where assignments included writing feature articles about Paraguay and Oaxaca. She has covered the Tijuana-San Diego border since 1994.

Tijuana detour: Southbound lanes at San Ysidro border crossing to be closed for 57 hours

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