North American border controls make international mobility challenging. How are transit providers coping?

Strasbourg, France's Line D tram, seen here in central Strasbourg, crosses the Rhine River to provide a one-seat connection to the center of Kehl, Germany. (Photo by me)

Within Europe’s Schengen Area, international borders are little more than what they actually are: lines drawn on paper. As a result, transit routes – from local bus and rail services to intercity high-speed trains – can cross these lines without having to slow down or stop.

Border officers have the authority to spot-check passengers’ travel documents, cell phones switch over to a different provider, and depending on the country it may be necessary to exchange currency. But for the most part, the experience is no different than crossing from one U.S. state into another.

For example, Strasbourg, France’s Line D tram crosses the Rhine River to serve Kehl, Germany. While the U.S. capital region struggles to find the funding for a second trans-Potomac Metro tunnel between DC and Virginia, a new trans-Rhine bridge (as seen in my video above) facilitated the line’s cross-border extension. For just a single flat fare, French residents can cross the border for refreshing beer, tasty schnitzel, and relatively inexpensive groceries, while Germans can enjoy Strasbourg’s idyllic canals and historic center or conduct business in the official seat of the European Parliament.

The San Ysidro border crossing facility separating San Diego and Tijuana looks quite a bit different than the tram bridge connecting Strasbourg and Kehl. (Photo courtesy of Times of San Diego)

In contrast to Western Europe, North American policymakers believe that, to ensure the public’s safety, it’s necessary for everyone who legally crosses an international border – be it by land, sea, or air – to stop, queue, and undergo inspection. There’s been a lot of talk about building a wall to mark one of the U.S.’s two land borders, but even at the other (longer) border, these inspections are mandatory for all crossers in both directions.

Even though each individual inspection typically doesn’t take long, at busy checkpoints those extra seconds add up and can cause hours-long waits in line. To make matters worse, many border crossing facilities are designed primarily for cars, and thus incorporate lots of asphalt, congestion, and pollution.

However, a few transit providers have found a way to facilitate functional mobility between the U.S. and Canada or Mexico. Though it’s impossible for these providers to match the efficiency of Schengen countries’ cross-border routes, their offerings do help mitigate the adverse impacts of inspections. Border regions with viable international transit options include San Diego-Tijuana, Detroit-Windsor, and Vancouver-Seattle.

San Diego-Tijuana: transit hubs and pedestrian infrastructure help bring two cities together

The trains don't continue south into Tijuana, but it's still a lot more convenient and pleasant to take transit to the U.S.-Mexico border's busiest crossing than it is to cross in a car. (Photo courtesy of KPBS)

Separating San Diego, California and Tijuana, Baja California, the San Ysidro border crossing is one of the world’s busiest. More than 30 million annual northbound travelers use the crossing to enter the U.S and, though exact data on southbound travelers is not readily available, a comparable number presumably use it to enter Mexico.

The crossing contains inspection facilities for both drivers and pedestrians, and more than a quarter of its users pass through on foot. As a result, public transit connections are essential to the facility’s functionality.

On the San Diego side, the Metropolitan Transit System’s Blue Line trolley (light rail) terminates at the border crossing facility. When U.S.-bound crossers step out of the main customs building, they’re literally on the San Ysidro station’s platform.

San Ysidro is MTS’s busiest non-transfer trolley station and during afternoon rush hour trains are typically packed all the way to the border, helping the Blue Line achieve a farebox recovery ratio of around 75 percent. Given that a transit trip from Mexico to Downtown San Diego takes about 30 minutes and a northward extension of the Blue Line to UC San Diego and the North University City job center is under construction, it’s no wonder that Club Tijuana Xoloitzcuintles de Caliente (the city’s Liga MX soccer team) refers to themselves as El Equipo sin Fronteras.

The Tijuana side of the crossing isn’t quite as transit-friendly, as southbound crossers are greeted by a congested street full of honking, overpriced taxicabs. But it’s still one of the city’s major transportation hubs.  Many microtransit routes stop nearby, as advertised by the La Linea signs in their windows. SITT, Tijuana’s Bus Rapid Transit system, also has a station at the border.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection continues to expand San Ysidro’s capacity to process drivers and pedestrians – PedWest, a second pedestrian crossing facility situated near the Las Americas outlet mall (a short walk or bus ride from the trolley station) opened in 2016 – but border crossers still can face long waits.

Hopes for easing the congestion may rest on encouraging crossers to use other inspection facilities further to the east. Transit improvements, including a rapid bus connecting Downtown San Diego to the Otay Mesa border crossing that began full service earlier this year, as well as privately operated shuttle bus routes connecting the Cross Border Xpress (CBX) pedestrian bridge at Tijuana International Airport to both Downtown and San Ysidro, are an integral part of this strategy.

Detroit-Windsor: a bi-national bus system

Fans ride Transit Windsor's Tunnel Bus to a Detroit Tigers game. (Photo by me)

Like Southern California, Southeast Michigan is incredibly auto-dependent. But Transit Windsor provides a resource San Diegans and Tijuanenses do not have: a local urban bus route that crosses the border. The transit provider’s Tunnel Bus circulates around both Detroit and Windsor’s downtowns, providing a one-seat, cross-border ride to and from numerous central-city destinations. In addition to regularly scheduled operations, special Tunnel Bus services bring border crossers directly to games and other major events.

However, in contrast to San Ysidro, it is not possible to cross between Detroit and Windsor on foot. This may be in part due to geographic limitations – while the San Diego-Tijuana border is a glorified fence, the Detroit River demarcates the Detroit-Windsor border. Currently, there’s no transportation infrastructure connecting the two cities’ downtowns other than a road tunnel, so to add a pedestrian crossing, improvements to the tunnel or a new bridge would be necessary.

Since any local travelers not using car-based transportation must board the Tunnel Bus, the buses are well-used. Despite a construction project that necessitated evening tunnel closures in 2018 and the poor performance of Detroit’s sports teams (which led to poor attendance and, accordingly, fewer people riding transit to the stadiums), more than 180,000 riders utilized the route last year.

However, because the two-lane tunnel does not have a dedicated bus lane, during busy periods buses often move more slowly than riders could walk . If the delays get too severe (as happened when I rode last summer) buses may short-turn, forgoing much of their regular downtown routing to return straight back across the border a few minutes closer to schedule.

 

Once through the tunnel, the bus pulls up to the border inspection facility, where all passengers must disembark. There’s no point in rushing to be the first person in the passport control queue, as cleared Tunnel Bus passengers entering the Motor City are herded straight back onto the bus. Even if the rider’s destination is adjacent to the border crossing, they must wait until every single rider has cleared inspection and re-boarded, after which the bus proceeds forward about fifty feet to its first Detroit stop.   

Vancouver-Seattle: an intercity rail line treated like air travel  

An Amtrak Cascades train in Vancouver, BC's Pacific Central Station. The fence separates platforms serving Amtrak trains to and from the U.S. from those serving domestic Via Rail trains. (Photo courtesy of Davidspix)

Amtrak offers three cross-border routes, all of which serve Canada. (Mexico’s national intercity passenger rail system all but ceased operation after the country privatized its tracks in the 1990s, though in recent years there’s been a push to rejuvenate some regional service.)

The Adirondack and Maple Leaf routes, which connect New York to Montreal and Toronto respectively, are treated similarly to other forms of cross-border surface transportation – at the border, the train stops and passengers undergo inspection either onboard or at an adjacent passport control facility. The train doesn’t start moving again until all passengers – as well as the railcars themselves – have cleared inspection, a process that can take as long as two hours (and took nearly ten minutes just for Amtrak to explain on video). By comparison, westbound TGV trains crossing the France-Germany border at Strasbourg pull into Paris, 300 miles away, after that amount of time.

But the third cross-border route – Amtrak Cascades, which connects Vancouver and Seattle and continues to destinations farther south, including Portland and Eugene, OR – is treated more like U.S.-Canada airline flights are.

Because there are no scheduled stops between Vancouver and the Canadian border, passengers traveling in both directions clear passport control at a facility in Vancouver’s station. As a result, they enjoy shorter, more reliable travel times. (Southbound trains currently have to stop briefly at the border for a secondary customs check, though efforts are underway to consolidate this check into the existing process at Vancouver and allow the train to cross into the U.S. at track speed.)

A similar passport control facility is also planned for Montreal’s station. Once it opens, Adirondack trains will have to bypass their only intermediate Canadian stop, Saint-Lambert, though intercity Via Rail and suburban Exo trains will still serve that station. The new facility is expected to help catalyze an extension of the Vermonter route (which currently operates between Washington, DC and St. Albans, VT) to Montreal.

Are international borders just lines, or do they mean something more?

A South Korean track inspection train crosses the Demilitarized Zone into North Korea in November 2018. It was the first train to cross between the two Koreas since 2008. (Photo courtesy of The Korea Times)

Worldwide, the North American approach to border control remains much more common than the Schengen approach. For example, travelers between the Schengen Area and United Kingdom have always had to undergo border inspections, even before all the Brexit drama. People using Eurostar high-speed trains to make that trip pass through pre-clearance facilities in their originating station, much as U.S.-bound Amtrak Cascades riders do in Vancouver.

For rail riders traveling eastbound out of the Schengen Area into ex-Soviet countries such as Belarus or Ukraine, the process is even more complex. Not only do border inspections take place, but the respective countries’ railroad tracks are built to different gauges. Thus, the trains’ bogies (wheels and axles) must be swapped at an exchange facility, or passengers must transfer to a different trainset to complete their trip.

And on the other side of Eurasia, a combination of geography and politics has rendered South Korea’s transportation system, though excellent for domestic purposes, comparable to those of island nations when it comes to international mobility. While an occasional test train may cross the DMZ during periods of relative détente, for all practical purposes the only way in or out of the country is by air or sea.

People protesting a Donald Trump rally in San Diego during the 2016 presidential campaign pass in front of a Blue Line train bound for San Ysidro and the border crossing to Tijuana. (Photo by me)

But it’s certainly possible that more countries will reach Schengen-like border agreements in the future. In North America, the U.S. and Canada already have a bilateral relationship that, border controls notwithstanding, is comparable to those the Schengen countries enjoy.

And while the current political climate may make easier U.S.-Mexico mobility (and an extension of San Diego’s Blue Line into Tijuana) difficult to imagine, just 80 years ago a cross-border tram line connecting France and Germany must have seemed even more of a fantasy as World War II loomed.