FHWA targets border congestion with technology

To reduce delays at US border crossings in New York, Michigan and Washington, the US Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has awarded US$256,470 for the use of innovative new technology that will provide information on wait times at border crossings and help manage delay by giving truckers advance notice of crossing conditions. FHWA’s Border Wait Time Deployment Initiative is designed to accelerate the adoption of innovative technology, such as sensors, to measure delay an
June 6, 2016 Read time: 2 mins
To reduce delays at US border crossings in New York, Michigan and Washington, the 324 US Department of Transportation’s 831 Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has awarded US$256,470 for the use of innovative new technology that will provide information on wait times at border crossings and help manage delay by giving truckers advance notice of crossing conditions.

FHWA’s Border Wait Time Deployment Initiative is designed to accelerate the adoption of innovative technology, such as sensors, to measure delay and wait times at land border ports of entry. The program supports the collection and dissemination of real-time traveller information to improve the reliability of goods movement across these borders.  

Under the initiative, FHWA will provide US$100,000 to the 1780 New York State Department of Transportation for its Niagara Falls International Rainbow Bridge, along with funding of US$95,920 to the 1688 Michigan Department of Transportation for technology at the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel Crossing with a grant. FHWA will also award US$60,550 to the Whatcom Council of Governments (WCOG) in Whatcom County, Washington, for the Booth Integration project. All of these research projects will use dynamic message signs and advance traveller information systems to convey the border wait times.

In recent years, trucker wait time and unexpected delays have been identified as an impediment to the free flow across the border, and the FHWA has undertaken several research initiatives aimed at measuring border delays at major land-border crossings.
Urban Traffic Control Air Quality & Weather Systems

Related Content

  • ITS advancement lays beyond benefit-cost analysis
    May 29, 2013
    Shelley Row, former Director of the US Department of Transportation’s ITS Joint Program Office, gives her views on the way forward for the industry. We, as intelligent transportation system (ITS) proponents and engineers, tend to be overly fixated on benefit-cost data. We want decisions to be made on logical grounds for which benefit-cost calculations are optimal. While benefit-cost data is necessary, it is not always sufficient. We can learn from our history where we see three broad groups of ITS deploymen
    Read More
  • Enforcement ensures equity for toll road users
    January 25, 2018
    All-electronic tolling boosts traffic flow but introduces the tricky question of enforcement. Workable solutions are starting to emerge. Enforcement is an essential part of tolling and one of the most important ways for a mobility agency to keep faith with its investors, its community stakeholders and the vast majority of its users. It can also be one of the most unpopular and contentious things a toll authority has to undertake. If tolling is about paying for the roads, then everyone has to pay their
    Read More
  • Utah Department of Transportation: How we’re using traffic analytics software
    February 4, 2025
    Our use of Iteris ClearGuide lets our traffic operations engineers interpret critical probe traffic data without the need for statisticians and software developers
    Read More
  • In-vehicle intersection violation Warning system
    January 31, 2012
    Mike Schagrin, ITS Joint Program Office, RITA, and John Harding, NHTSA, describe US progress towards an in-vehicle Intersection Violation Warning system. In 2008, there were 37,261 fatalities on US roadways. Of these, 7,772, some 20.8 per cent of the total, were defined as intersection crashes or intersection-related crashes. Through a multi-agency research initiative led by the Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA), the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) has developed a prototype In
    Read More

Highlighted Content