The World’s Worst Commute
January 3rd, 2007
While Southern California is notorious for its snarled freeways and frustrating drives, the hardest commute lies just over the border in Tijuana, where drivers leave home at 1am in order to be in San Diego by 9. Total distance: twenty miles. Total time: up to eight hours.
The San Ysidro Port of Entry between California and Mexico is the busiest border crossing in the world, with 47,000 cars passing through each day, but it is ill-equipped to face the realities of the trans-national commuters. Late at night, only four lanes into America stay open, yet if commuters arrive when the other twenty open at 4am, they will be stuck in even worse rush hour traffic.
Designing traffic solutions is never easy, especially not in a sprawling metropolis sliced by a contentious border. Yet, the solution to this problem is simple: fund the Border Patrol to keep all the lanes open, all the time. The border won’t be any ‘looser’; it will simply reflect daily life in Southern California. The environmental and social consequences of the current system are too important to be obscured in the larger political battles over immigration.
Link via LA Times.
Popularity: 6% [?]
January 3rd, 2007 at 10:52 pm
Yet another great reason for biking to work. I’m not sure if the border crossing has a bike lane though
January 10th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
I biked across the Switzerland/Germany border. I tried to get out my passport to show the guard at the border, but I kind of fouled up traffic and I got waved through without showing it. On the way back I found a bike path across the border that was completely unmarked. Unfortunately I don’t think that the US/Mexico border works that way.
February 12th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
Actually, there is a business that charges you $5 to rent a bicycle for 5 minutes so that you can pedal right up to the “bicycle-only” lane and cross the border. (They have a drop-off point on the U.S. side of the border where you can return the bicycle.)