$7 million WSDOT grant intended to help speed U.S.-Canada border crossings in Whatcom County
More timely information about wait times at the U.S-Canada border is the focus of a nearly $7 million grant to the Washington State Department of Transportation.
WSDOT funding was awarded through the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Strengthening Mobility and Revolutionizing Transportation grant program. A project funded by the grant also aims to get people across the border faster at Blaine, Lynden and Sumas, according to a statement released Tuesday.
About $24 million in funding for projects across Washington state was announced this week as part of President Biden’s signature infrastructure bill, Democratic U.S. Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray said in a joint statement.
“This grant will provide crucial funding to install new technology that will improve traffic management during border-crossing surges that will keep travelers and goods moving,” Cantwell said.
Cantwell and Murray said the border wait-time notification systems in Whatcom County are “failing or becoming obsolete” because they are more than 20 years old.
In 2022, the Whatcom Council of Governments received a half-million-dollar SMART grant to plan the upcoming border notification project.
“The technology used to estimate traffic delays doesn’t work as well in queued conditions; accuracy is impacted with infrastructure or operational changes; there are no calculations for commercial wait times; and wait times provided are estimates when an ideal system would provide estimated and actual wait times as two calculations,” the Whatcom Council of Governments said in 2022.
Such real-time information about border crossings in Whatcom County will be crucial for travelers in 2026, when the FIFA World Cup soccer matches will be played in Seattle and Vancouver, B.C., the senators’ statement said.
Those games are expected to increase border traffic dramatically, just as crossings increased in the first week of December for pop star Taylor Swift’s final Eras Tour concerts in Vancouver, B.C., according to the Northern Light newspaper in Blaine.
Blaine has third busiest passenger vehicle crossing along the entire U.S.-Canada border, behind Buffalo, N.Y., and Detroit, according to data from the U.S Bureau of Transportation. Blaine also has the second-highest bus traffic, and is the fourth-busiest commercial truck crossing.
Nearly 3 million passenger cars and trucks crossed into the U.S. from Canada at Blaine in 2023, a figure that was almost 45% higher than in 2022 as international travel recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic.
In addition, a total of 356,021 commercial trucks entered the U.S. from Canada in 2023 at Blaine.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection data doesn’t offer overall information about average border wait times. Rather, it provides the estimated time to cross into Canada based on historical data on a daily basis by month.
According to those statistics, it can take a car more than an hour to get across the border at noon on a summer weekend, but only a few minutes in the early morning hours on a January weekday.
This story was originally published December 30, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
