New app cuts travelers wait times at U.S. border crossings

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency and updated hourly. The developers at UC San Diego download that data within minutes so users of the Android app or the related Web site can click on any border crossing and see current waits for passenger vehicles, commercial vehicles, and even pedestrian queues where they exist.

The border agency’s current wait times are supplied by border agents, who ask commuters how long they waited to cross the check point. The data is made available on the agency’s own Web site, but it is easily misconstrued.

When a commuter informs the border agent at, say, 10 a.m., that he or she has been waiting for two hours, the government site displays the wait time at 10 a.m. as ‘two hours’. If the motorist arrived at 8 a.m. and had to wait two hours, that would have been the wait time as of 8 a.m. (when the wait began).

“We take this into account and time-shift our graphs to correct this discrepancy,” said Chockalingam.

The release notes that the true value-added of the ‘Best Time to Cross the Border’ app is contained in a series of historical graphs that are typically updated several times an hour. The graphs depict data from the past three months to show the average border wait, for every hour, and each day of the week (including weekends). The average waits can vary substantially. At the San Ysidro (Tijuana) crossing into San Diego last week, the app estimated the border wait on a Monday at 10 p.m. to take eighty-seven minutes, while an hour later the average waiting time dropped to fifty-one minutes.  In other words, having that information on a smartphone meant that the motorist could have spent 40 percent less time behind other cars at the border — just by crossing one hour later (see the wait time trends for the Tijuana/San Ysidro border crossing here):

The new service was largely built by three student programmers from the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering’s Computer Science and Engineering department. First-year Master’s student Gen Liu developed the Android app; freshman Rustin Manafian designed the mobile Web; and senior Patrick Guan created the Web front end. Data collection and front-end programming was overseen by staff Web developer Mike Chiu, and Ganz Chockalingam conceived the idea for the project.

The Border Wait app went up on the Google Play! site last week, and it will soon be available for download through Amazon. On the Web, Caltrans is now linking to the Border Wait site from its San Diego real-time traffic map.

Calit2’s Chockalingam says his group his waiting to see the response from travelers to the new Android app and Web site, and if a lot of people download the service, an iPhone version is likely to follow.  Calit2 already offers an iPhone App for its free wireless traffic service.