Truckers in Washington state will soon have access to more accurate information when it comes to wait times at U.S.-Canada border crossings.
On Tuesday, Dec. 17, Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., announced in a joint statement the state had secured nearly $7 million in funding for projects to “deploy new technologies that will provide better information for travelers and streamline crossings at the Canadian border.”
The grant money for the state was awarded through the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Strengthening Mobility and Revolutionizing Transportation grant program. Backing from the program is intended for projects that are “focused on advanced smart community technologies and systems in order to improve transportation efficiency and safety.”
In 2022, the Whatcom Council of Governments received a Stage One SMART grant to “evaluate and pilot hardware to improve the system’s reliability.” Cantwell and Murray said with the recently acquired dollars, they will continue the work started by the previous funding.
“Building on the work from Stage One, WSDOT will deploy a border wait time system for passenger and commercial vehicles at four Points of Entry in Whatcom County that will provide real-time border conditions, trip planning tools, traffic management information, and predictive analytics tools for the traveling public, commercial carriers, and the transportation and inspection agencies,” the joint statement read.
According to the grant proposal, Stage Two of the project – dubbed the Cascade Gateway Advanced Border Information System Implementation Project – will deploy a hybrid solution of innovative technologies to replace and improve aging border wait time systems at the state’s four border crossings.
“The systems that provide travelers information about wait times at our northern border are over 20 years old and desperately need an upgrade,” Cantwell said. “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, including when over 750,000 people visit Seattle for the 2026 World Cup.”
Traffic at the state’s border crossings, particularly the port in Blaine, has increased in recent years. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation, the port is the third busiest passenger vehicle crossing along the entire U.S.-Canada border, and is the fourth-busiest commercial truck crossing. A total of 356,021 commercial trucks entered the U.S. from Canada in 2023 at Blaine. LL
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