The most crossed border crossing is far from being the most efficient. The problems vary; inadequate alimentation of vehicular flow to the San Ysidro border crossing, the lack of signs, and an untrained tourist police without fixed personnel. Their duty is only limited to controlling the line for medical and tourist services, which is a large business for Tijuanas city hall, as it is estimated that tourism has generated an income of more than $36 million pesos (about $2.4 million dollars) between 2011 and 2014.
But lets look at this by parts. The inadequate alimentation and signs of the Secure Electronic Network for Travelers Rapid Inspection (SENTRI) lanes causes that, on average, each week 400 drivers that are not users of the program enter these lanes. What are the consequences? If this is the first time the person makes the mistake, they are given a warning. If the person is Mexican, in addition to the warning, their entire car is checked, which takes around five minutes, and they are sent to secondary inspection, where in the best case, they will lose half an hour. But if the person makes the mistake twice, whether they are American or Mexican, they will be fined $5,000 dollars. All due to inadequate orientation to the drivers on behalf of the tourist police in Tijuana, the lack of signs for the SENTRI lanes and no specification explaining the program. This is paradoxical, as this is a zone has a lot of publicity, billboards, posters, and screens, etc.
But whose responsibility is it to post signs? One could think that it is the US authorities, but this is not the case, the responsibility to orient citizens on how to cross the border to the United States falls upon the Tijuana city hall and the National Migration Institute. The Tijuana authorities also fail to notify American authorities regarding changes in transit routes.
While the Mexican authorities start to show greater will to coordinate themselves, the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) could help the citizens by offering correct information regarding wait times and the number of open lanes for commercial vehicles, passengers and the pedestrian crossing through the CBP Border Wait Times app. Because, currently, the times this app shows are usually incorrect, with up to an hour of more of error.
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