Gridlock Grips the Border

You might envy Nestor Moran for the short distance from his home to work. His morning destination, a family-run import business, sits only a few miles away as the crow flies, barely out of view from Moran’s hilltop neighborhood.

But there is nothing enviable about the ordeal he faces to get there.

Midway between Moran’s home in Tijuana and his job in San Ysidro is the U.S.-Mexico border, the site of a maddening daily traffic jam where, even under normal circumstances, delays can hit two hours without warning and motorists engage in a lane-hopping, bumper-nudging, cutthroat brand of automotive jousting that leaves little room for the timid.

“Get a small car and fast reflexes,” advises Moran, a 26-year-old U.S. citizen who moved to Tijuana with his wife last year. And don’t look back: “Everybody’s out for themselves,” he says. “If you see an opening, you’ve got to take it.”

Even before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, waiting was the top issue in a border zone where 40,000 northbound cars arrive around the clock, surging and ebbing to the rhythms of a binational lifestyle. While public attention gravitates to the dark intrigues of drug-and people-smuggling, anyone living on either side who crosses legally to work, shop and socialize knows the border’s biggest daily headache is the numbing traffic jam.

Since terrorism has brought stricter security at the nation’s entrance points, the border commute has gotten even more grueling.

The crossing here is the busiest, and the wait has swelled to up to four hours since inspectors began searching many more cars.

Border commuters are an enduring and resilient breed, and they have developed survival tactics. Some park on the Tijuana side and cross on foot, even though pedestrian-only lines can stretch a mile. Others stay overnight with friends or relatives in San Diego to avoid the long waits in predawn darkness.

Moran started rising earlier but still got to work late. So on some days, he’s taken to riding his bicycle--a half-hour trip that lets him skirt the sea of queued cars. (Some commuters have been even more wily. Moran recently saw a helmeted man slip to the front of the vehicle lanes on a child’s scooter. He was turned back, his wheels having failed to gain him the same access bicycles are permitted.)

The issue goes beyond inconvenience. Longer waits are pinching the region’s economy by slowing crossings, which dropped 30% in the weeks after the attacks and have yet to pick up again.

Even before Sept. 11, meetings were missed and deadlines blown due to delays. Business leaders and tourism officials on both sides have long insisted the specter of long waits costs the region millions of dollars a year because residents won’t venture across the border for a meal or a movie. But no one has ever tracked the losses.

The new crackdown has added urgency.

“It was hard enough when you were in this haphazard security situation, worried about commerce and illegal immigration and smuggling. Now you’ve got all these security considerations,” said Chuck Nathanson, head of the nonprofit San Diego Dialogue, which promotes cross-border ties.

Nathanson sees a possible silver lining: officials and the border communities having to find new ways to manage the busy, and vital, crossing. There’s talk, still remote, of creating a border authority to raise revenues and oversee operations in a way similar to entities that run airports and seaports.

Technology may help. Biometrics, which allows machines to match faces with documents, and other advances might permit an inspector in a control booth to monitor traffic in several lanes at once. Buried scales and use of X-ray machines similar to those that peer into freight trucks could detect hidden cargo.

Another creative idea would put more inspectors per lane, borrowing the “double checker” system familiar to discount-store shoppers. And a new port of entry proposed near Otay Mesa, which would be the third San Diego-area crossing, would take up some of the load.

Any answer must confront a flow that is relentless. Besides the usual morning and evening rush hours, traffic surges during the Mexican midafternoon lunch break as parents head north to run errands and pick up their children from private schools. On Sundays there are huge tie-ups from Mexicans visiting relatives in San Diego and Californians returning from beach outings in Baja California.

Southbound backups are sporadic and seldom as bad. When people talk about the wait, they mean entering the United States.

The long, fan-shaped row of 24 inspection booths is the finish line of a commuter derby that can begin a mile away, depending on the backup. Streams of cars coagulate into a wide mass of idled steel. Exhaust fumes are thick as vendors take advantage of the captive clientele, hawking everything from Mexican blankets and tot-sized Winnie the Pooh desks to cups of coffee dispensed from backpacks.

Many people kill time reading the newspaper. Others fidget with their cellular phones or listen to the radio.

But all are looking for a faster line.

Driving on a recent morning, Moran was unfazed by a wall of stopped cars half a mile before the international boundary.

“This is where we take advantage,” he said, traveling with a passenger. Moran steered his pickup into a lane reserved for vehicles with three or more occupants. Most of the other cars in the carpool lane similarly held one or two people. Moran said this was typical. The lane proved quicker: 40 minutes.

The rules of the road are different here. Hardened border commuters know, for example, that tailgating isn’t rude. It’s a defense tactic.

“People who drive every day, they know you drive bumper to bumper because if you leave any space, they’ll jump in,” said Roberto Lopez, who endured five years of the scramble before signing up for a new high-tech commuter lane. “You have to be aggressive.”

Lopez, a foundry worker in Tijuana who commutes from his home in San Ysidro, has witnessed fistfights and fender-benders, but managed to avoid both calamities during an estimated 700 hours waiting over the years.

And there’s always been ingenuity. Gary Gallegos, a former Caltrans official, said an employee who lived in Tijuana used to ride a moped to outflank the stopped cars, then load it onto a car he kept on the U.S. side for the drive to work in San Diego.

Even those who study such things say the border offers a traffic scenario unlike that faced by most commuters anywhere else.

“It’s sort of like a tollbooth, except that instead of a tollbooth, where everybody is doing the same transaction and it’s taking the same amount of time--and generally not very much time--in this case, the transactions to be completed and the amount of time can vary wildly,” said James Banks, a San Diego State University engineer who has studied the San Ysidro traffic jam.

Banks said the feverish lane-jumping is mostly for naught, since motorists can’t know which line will move fastest.

The 40,000 cars entering at San Ysidro each day equals the number of cars coursing Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. Hollywood motorists, however, don’t have to stop for immigration and customs officers, as at San Ysidro.

There is little resistance to the idea that U.S. inspectors must scrutinize cars for contraband or undocumented immigrants. Few oppose the new checks for bombs.

But critics argued in recent months that U.S. officials were failing a commitment made a few years ago to keep waits down by opening as many of the 24 inspection gates as possible. Average delays had tripled since 1997, when the government made a push to shorten delays. San Diego Dialogue quit tracking wait times early this year because officials paid no attention, it said. The number of open lanes ranges by time of day, from as few as two in the early morning hours when the traffic is lightest to nearly all.

What has long vexed motorists most is unpredictability. There is no telling from one day to the next when the crossing will take a tolerable 20 minutes or when it will swallow most of an afternoon.

Bulletins on local television and radio stations are often unreliable, say commuters. Two Web sites tally line lengths, and a U.S. government hotline estimates wait times, but officials concede that measurements are inexact.

Motorists treat the crossing as a crapshoot.

“How do you plan? I’m amazed people do it every day,” said Gallegos, who now heads the San Diego Assn. of Governments, which was bringing new attention to the problem even before Sept. 11.

Traffic is a guessing game even for border officials, who may look up to see a long line form in the wee hours, or be surprised at unusually light traffic at peak times.

“Some Monday mornings, there’s no wait. We just put our hands up in the air and say, ‘I don’t know,’ ” said Adele Fasano, INS director in San Diego.

INS officials in San Diego say turnover among border inspectors has hampered efforts to open all 24 gates. The agency scraped together overtime funds last summer to open a few more lanes, for up to 22 total lanes during morning rush hour. That may not seem a big advance, but it made front-page news in a region weary of waiting.

Economic-development boosters say it might make sense to give the federal government a hand. Some on the U.S. side are exploring the idea of steering local sales tax revenue to help pay for federal port of entry operations. But the idea raises legal questions over whether the federal government can accept outside help.

Communities nearest the border have the most at stake from ups and downs in commerce due to delays. Cross-border shoppers from Mexico generate more than $120 million yearly in sales taxes for communities in San Diego.

The vast majority of crossings are legal, with arrests occurring only about once every 900 arrivals. Most people commuting to jobs are Americans living in Tijuana, such as Moran and his wife, a schoolteacher in National City, or legal U.S. residents. Many of them, like the Morans, are living in Tijuana to save money.

Many others who cross to shop and visit carry a U.S.-issued border visa that allows them to stay for up to 72 hours but not to work. On average, 350,000 of the region’s residents cross at least every other day.

The high-tech commuter lane, for motorists who’ve been checked for criminal pasts and paid a $129 fee for a car transponder, has 8,000 subscribers. But that’s too few to make a dent in the congestion.

More typical is the tedious, car-by-car process in which drivers and occupants are questioned about citizenship and cargo. Since the terror attacks, inspectors have peered into trunks and engine compartments of most cars and looked underneath as drivers waited.

Unlike drivers on jammed freeway who can flee to surface streets, border motorists have no escape. For drivers who are late for an appointment or simply have to use the bathroom, the stalled traffic can make for anxious moments.

Moran’s wife was due to give birth a few months ago when the borrowed Mustang they were driving broke down during the northbound wait. Determined that his child would be born on U.S. soil, Moran pushed the disabled vehicle across the border and called for help.

Alejandra Mier y Teran, a former Tijuana resident who lives on the U.S. side and heads the Otay Mesa Chamber of Commerce, said all the waiting exacts an invisible toll on border denizens: “People not getting to meetings, people not closing the deal--how do you calculate that?”