Episode 94. Bridge to Everywhere: How to Keep International Trucks Moving While Expanding The Bridge of the Americas.

Allan Rutter (00:15):
Howdy everyone. Welcome to Thinking Transportation–conversations about how we get ourselves and the stuff we need from one place to another. I’m Allan Rutter with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.

Allan Rutter (00:29):
Today, we’re going to discuss possible changes to truck movements on international bridges and border crossings in the El Paso region. This episode is different in that we get into a little more detail than we normally do. We discuss a lot of numbers. Not math–just numbers of a variety of locations and a collection of agencies and acronyms. I’m grateful that our guests are uniquely capable of explaining how border crossings work in this region–with two big cities, three states, and two nations–that is home to 2.7 million people. Joining us are two of my TTI colleagues from our El Paso Urban Office. Dr. Rafael Aldrete is a senior research scientist, acting director of TTIs Operations Research Group, director of TTIs Center for International Intelligent Transportation Research, and a Texas A&M University System Regents Fellow. Jeff Shelton is a senior research scientist and Multi-Resolution Modeling Program manager in the San Antonio and El Paso Regional Division. Welcome guys.

Jeff Shelton (01:36):
Thanks for having us.

Rafael Aldrete (01:38):
Thank you, Allan. Thank you for having us.

Allan Rutter (01:41):
So, we’ll do some level-setting before we get into more detail about the Bridge of the Americas in El Paso. About how many bridges and border crossings connect Texas and New Mexico with the state of Chihuahua and Mexico–generally within the El Paso region? From Santa Teresa to Tornillo.

Rafael Aldrete (02:01):
So, I’ll go from west to east. We have this Santa Teresa crossing–it’s not a bridge–between the state of Chihuahua and the state of New Mexico. That’s on the west side of El Paso, on the other side of the border with New Mexico. That’s a commercial bridge that includes pedestrian passenger vehicles and, more importantly, commercial vehicles. For the purpose of this discussion, then going east we have the the Stanton Bridge, which is also located in central El Paso, and it has three lanes for southbound-north commercial traffic and one northbound lane for sentry vehicles. And then next to it, or in the same general area, we have the Paso del Norte Bridge, which is serving again the downtown bridge, but it’s only serving northbound passenger vehicle traffic. It has four northbound lanes, and in pedestrians, they are traveling in both directions, no trucks at these crossings. Moving further east, we have the Bridge of the Americas, which is federally owned.

Rafael Aldrete (03:03):
It doesn’t have a toll. It’s a bridge that serves commercial vehicles, passenger vehicles, and pedestrian traffic, both northbound and southbound. And going further east, we have the Zaragoza Bridge, which is a bridge that is owned by the city of El Paso. And it’s serving passenger commercial and pedestrian traffic northbound and southbound. And finally, all the way out in the county of El Paso, out of the city of El Paso, we have the new bridge of the Tornillo port of entry, which is owned by the county of El Paso. And that bridge serves commercial pedestrian and passenger vehicle traffic. That’s a brand new bridge, was just open to service about a year and two months ago. And changing modes, we have two rail crossings. We have the Union Pacific Rail Bridge, which is a single track crossing located east of the Paso del Norte Bridge. And then we also have BNSF Rail Bridge, which is a single track crossing that is west of the Paso del Norte Bridge. So those are the bridges serving the El Paso area.

Allan Rutter (04:15):
Well that’s very helpful, Rafa. And it also kind of speaks to there being multiple owners of these crossings. You’ve got El Paso, the city; El Paso County; the International Bridge and Water Commission; I guess the federal guys, who own Bridge of the Americas; and then Santa Teresa is New Mexico Border Authority?

Rafael Aldrete (04:36):
Correct.

Allan Rutter (04:38):
So you also described in part the fact that each of these bridges, there’s directional traffic and then there’s a mix of traffic–there’s automobiles, pedestrians, and trucks. You described that the two downtown bridges don’t have any trucks while Bridge of the Americas OSA and to all have some commercial motor vehicle access.

Rafael Aldrete (05:03):
That is correct.

Allan Rutter (05:04):
So if you were describe sort of, generally–and Jeff, feel free to jump in here–the sort of distribution of trucks, what’s the mix?

Rafael Aldrete (05:16):
Okay, so now in terms of truck volumes, commercial vehicle volumes, I’m going to be describing the volumes for 2022. The reason for that is, we do have data for 2023, but 2023, at least for the Bridge of the Americas, had a very erratic pattern of traffic, which is, you know, not consistent with what we are seeing today. So, I’ll begin from west to east with the Port of Santa Teresa. In Santa Teresa, we had 159,570 trucks in the entire year .At the Bridge of the Americas, going east, we had 161,405 trucks in the entire year. And, finally at the port of Ysleta, we had 649,561 trucks in the entire year. The port of Tornillo didn’t open until 2023. So, I’m not gonna cover that. But Jeff, what can you tell us as far as more recent daily numbers?

Jeff Shelton (06:17):
Okay, so let’s look at the current daily numbers of trucks crossing. That equates to, Santa Teresa, that’s about a little less than 600 trucks daily. BOTA has a little less than 500 trucks crossing northbound daily. Zaragoza is the big winner–little less than 2,500 trucks crossing on a daily basis. And as Rafa mentioned, Tornillo opened in 2023. And today, you know, it’s not very high, it’s a little less than a hundred trucks per day.

New Speaker (06:45):
I was just gonna say one more thing about the truck traffic. It’s not open 24 hours for trucks to cross northbound. I think the hours of operation are from 6:00 a.m. to midnight, I believe. So, the trucks start queuing up in the morning waiting for it to open.

Rafael Aldrete (07:00):
So, that’s an important distinction to highlight because passenger vehicles can cross 24 hours of the day in regular lanes, and trucks can’t.

Allan Rutter (07:11):
I really appreciate that. And our listeners can kind of get a sense for Zaragoza, and Tornillo and BOTA, right now involve a lot of trucks. One of the things we’ll do in our show notes about the episode is link to the Texas-Mexico Border Transportation Master Plan, which was published by the Texas Department of Transportation. And that does a really thorough job of outlining the federal, state, and local agencies that are involved in planning and operating border crossing functions. Now, for our listeners, at a high level, can you kind of describe the roles and responsibilities again, northern side of the border crossings, of the General Services Administration, Customs and Border Protection and other inspection agencies. Who does what and what’s their various responsibilities?

Rafael Aldrete (08:07):
I’ll take that question. So, in general, for the crossings where we have commercial vehicles crossing, we have several agencies involved. On the U.S. side, we have first, Customs and Border Protection. They’re in charge of customs and immigration inspections. We also have the Federal Motor Carrier Services Administration–they inspect commercial vehicles crossing into the U.S. for safety. And outside the federal compound–these two agencies are within what we call the federal compound–outside the federal compound, we also have the Texas Department of Public Safety that conducts safety inspections of vehicles coming into the state at the ports of entry. In addition to them, we also have the General Services Administration, who is the landlord, the owner of the ports of entry on the U.S. side. In some instances–for example, in the cases where the bridge is owned by a city, a municipality, or the county–we also have the owner of the facility, which in the case of the city of El Paso, is the city of El Paso. In the case of Santa Teresa, is the state of New Mexico. And in the case of the Tornillo port of entry, is the county of El Paso. So, you have all those agencies involved, and to the extent that these facilities connect to the road network on the U.S. side, you also have the Texas Department of Transportation, of course, and the city of El Paso.

Allan Rutter (09:27):
So a lot of parties are involved, and distinguishes both functionality and physical. These are not just bridges. These involve an awful lot of activity, both as you described, Rafa, customs and immigration inspections. One final bit of context: you guys participate in a city of El Paso bridges steering committee. Who all is part of that group? And, once again, remind us which bridges the city is responsible for?

Rafael Aldrete (10:00):
So, basically the most comprehensive group that we have in the region to coordinate the operation of the ports of entry is led by the city of El Paso. So, In the steering committee, the city of El Paso has assembled all these agencies that I described. Generally, they participate in this meeting, and in addition to them you also have truckers, for example, maquiladoras and other private-sector participants on the Mexican side; often we also have the Mexican counterpart agencies. So, we may have the Mexican Aduanas and the Fideicomisode, the Puentes de Chihuahua, which is the agency that manages and operates the crossings on the Mexican side for the state of Chihuahua. So, it’s a very comprehensive group of people that includes TTI. Of course, it includes The University of Texas-El Paso and other stakeholders in the region.

Allan Rutter (10:51):
Okay. Let’s now home in on the Bridge of the Americas or BOTA. This bridge opened in 1967 is owned by the International Boundary and Water Commission, U.S. and Mexico sections, for each side of the river. And currently, that bridge provides access for pedestrians, automobiles, and trucks. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, IAJA, included $3.4 billion in funding for GSA–the General Services Administration–infrastructure at northern and southern borders–that’s U.S. and Canada and Mexico–and GSA has determined that about $650 to $700 million will go toward modernizing the GSA facilities at BOTA. In September, just a couple months ago, the GSA issued a draft environmental impact statement and identified a preferred alternative for the functionality and footprint of the new modernized BOTA. Tell us a little bit about those alternatives and what their preferred alternative does for the truck traffic that now uses the bridge.

Jeff Shelton (12:05):
Well, I think there’s a couple different design alternatives for BOTA. Do nothing; keep the existing footprint; and just modernize the bridge. There was another design to expand the bridge, and kind of take away our county coliseum, which is located adjacent to it. There was a lot of opposition to that because we have a nice hockey team here. So, there was a big protest about that, you know; and the big deal is whether or not to kick trucks out of BOTA. That’s the main hot topic now. It’s been going on for years, but since we’ve got this investment in this bridge, it’s really come to light as to whether or not the trucks should stay in there, you know? And of course the pedestrians and the people that live in the community around BOTA, they don’t want the truck traffic. They don’t want the emissions. On the flip side, you know, you have a lot of maquiladoras on the south side that are located centrally in Mexico, right south of the bridge. So, if the trucks aren’t allowed to cross at BOTA anymore, they’re gonna have to go out of their way to cross that other crossing. So you know, that’s a hot topic right now.

Allan Rutter (13:13):
S,o how have you guys gone about determining the answer to the question if trucks don’t go across at BOTA, where do they go and how do they get there? And talk a little bit about how you guys went about helping that steering committee and those regional stakeholders get a sense for where the BOTA-driven trucks would go if they were kept from using the current bridge.

Jeff Shelton (13:41):
So, CBP [Customs and Border Protection] approached us and asked us to look at, what if we kicked the trucks out of BOTA and we increased capacity at Zaragoza, the nearest crossing where trucks would shift their route northbound. CBP said, “What if we expanded our bridge to include four more inspection booths and six more inspection booths with the current footprint of just two crossing lanes northbound for commercial trucks?” And then rerun all those scenarios again, but adding an additional lane on the bridge… Now you have three lanes of traffic for trucks, and that same thing with two more additional booths, four more additional booths and six more additional booths. So, we ended up building a simulation model of Ysleta-Zaragoza–I’ll just call it Zaragoza for short–Bridge for northbound commercial traffic. We had to calibrate the model to existing conditions, meaning we had certain booths open at certain amount of times because all the inspection booths are not open the entire duration of when trucks can cross.

Jeff Shelton (14:42):
And we had to calibrate the model based on average wait times for vehicles getting inspected. So, once we had all this data built into the model, then we started running the scenarios to see what would the impact be. The results from the model showed some significant improvements as far as queue length and total crossing time. For the listeners, “queue length” is how many vehicles are sitting in traffic in line waiting. Just the existing footprint of two booths reduced the queue by 44 percent. And then, when you had four booths, it decreased the queue length by 50 percent. And then we had six booths; it just [had] an incremental [impact] of 51 percent [reduction]. The total travel time was reduced by 25/29 percent on average for those scenarios. And then, when you added the additional lane, it didn’t really change the queue length that much, okay, because the trucks still bottleneck at the inspection. So, even though you had another lane of trucks coming into CBP facility, it didn’t really change the queue length or travel time that much more from the two lanes.

Allan Rutter (15:51):
So, the controlling factor that sort of results out of this fairly sophisticated modeling of how things work is to the extent that you make it possible for more trucks to be inspected, that that reduces… And then you push through those additional trucks that are gonna come from BOTA–adding inspection lengths, not so much adding bridge capacity, would allow for those additional trucks to get through the Zaragoza complex without adding a whole lot more congestion.

Jeff Shelton (16:27):
Correct. And you know, it’s not just traffic too we’re talking about; we’re also talking about fuel consumption, air quality, and emissions too. So just having any sort of reduction–that really helps everything overall for the bridge operations.

Allan Rutter (16:42):
It sounds like one of the possibilities is that as GSA goes about, its spending $600 million to redo BOTA in sort of central El Paso, you’ve got a bunch of things on the north side of town, which are going to affect the availability and capacity of Santa Teresa, also to accommodate some of that predominantly commercial traffic.

Rafael Aldrete (17:11):
Correct.

Jeff Shelton (17:12):
Yeah. And there’s another thing we have to factor in, and then that’s southbound too, especially at BOTA, because before you used to be able to access going to Mexico southbound from Paisano, that was shut down. So, now everything’s funneled back from I-10 into the direct connects, and those direct connects routinely spill back all the way onto the freeway mainlanes. A lot of trucks cross at other bridges, but they tend to go southbound with empty cargo at BOTA. And so, the trucks, passenger vehicles all go in there, especially in the afternoon during rush hour. That queue will spill back more than a mile onto the freeway sometimes. I’ve seen it that long on Saturdays in the afternoon. So it really does cause congestion, headaches for commuters, you know, traveling on I-10 daily.

Allan Rutter (18:03):
Which sort of speaks to the general stakeholder reaction to the prospect of moving trucks off of BOTA. What’s the capacity of the roadway network for those southbound truck movements on to Zaragoza? Is it ready for the kind of increase in truck traffic?

Rafael Aldrete (18:23):
What I’d say is the problem that we currently have in the region, and all the agencies in the region, is that nobody has exact counts of how many trucks are crossing southbound on the Bridge of the Americas. So, that makes it difficult to assess what the actual problem is going to be. So, that’s one of the big issues right now. Agencies in the region are trying to clarify and we’ve been asked to help and you know, we’re currently beginning to conduct some counts southbound of commercial vehicles. But we’re just beginning that, so we don’t have those figures yet.

Allan Rutter (18:57):
Getting back to … we talked about some of the complications of truck movements in El Paso-Juarez, and in thinking about the possibilities of expanding Zaragoza, who are the agencies involved in helping make that kind of decision? If it looks like, you know, GSA for its own environmental purposes says no truck traffic at BOTA, who’s involved in deciding what happens at Zaragoza from an institutional standpoint? Who are the folks that are involved in that federal compound footprint to allow for those additional inspection lanes?

Rafael Aldrete (19:38):
I mean, I’d say it’s GSA and CBP, but you know, they have a budget. For example, the money that has been allocated for the Bridge of the Americas, that is the result of longstanding effort by leaders in the community to obtain that funding allocated to GSA for the purposes of the renovation of the Bridge of the Americas. So, a similar effort will have to take place to seek funding to be allocated to the GSA for the purposes of expanding the Zaragoza Bridge. So, I guess what we have heard from the agencies is that it is not up to them. It is really about the community having that as a priority and then seeking the funding from federal sources or other sources.

Allan Rutter (20:19):
Yeah, like you explained, $600 million just doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the result of an awful lot of effort. And I also heard that GSA are the ones who build the lanes in the booths and CBP are the ones who put bodies in the lanes to actually accommodate the truck movement. And there you get into the difference between capital and operating, and an annual appropriation versus authorization of some big capital thing.

Rafael Aldrete (20:47):
Correct. Part of the constraint is there has to be an inspection, right? A result of the security needs, you know, part of the mission of CBP. So it’s not only the infrastructure, right, it’s also maintaining, like Allan’s talking about, the staff, right? Because it doesn’t matter that we have 35 lanes of inspection if we only have 17 officers to staff them in a secure manner.

Allan Rutter (21:09):
Complicated, expensive. One of the things I was trying to guess is whether the draft environmental impact statement that GSA put together has some estimates of truck traffic, particularly those that are coming through BOTA. But did they, in that EIS, either accommodate or consider the cumulative effects of moving BOTA truck traffic elsewhere, and/or some of the other construction related things happening regionwide? Or is it just, this is about the footprint and operation of the BOTA federal compound?

Jeff Shelton (21:48):
Our MPO has a binational model. It’s a static model of El Paso, Juarez, and Santa Teresa, too. So, they do some preliminary projections of what’s gonna happen if you shut down the bridge. Where does this truck traffic go? We also are in the process of building a binational model. So, now you can look at traffic at any given point of the day instead of just an average. And that’ll really give you a good idea of what will happen and where the trucks will shift to if BOTA is closed. Now, I recently helped a UTEP student, and his thesis was actually shutting down BOTA to truck traffic. And so we gave him an older model, of course, and he calibrated as best he could. And when he shut down BOTA, the truck traffic shifted to Zaragoza, like 90 percent of it. So you know, 400 or 500 more trucks kicked out of BOTA all shifted to Zaragoza. ‘Cause, you know, the model’s looking for shortest path of origin to destination. That’s kind of the big question right now.

Rafael Aldrete (22:50):
And we also try to get a glimpse into what that would look like by using crowdsourced data sources such as INRIX origin-destination travel data. And fortunately, we were able to cut a time period when the Bridge of the Americas was closed as a result of enhanced inspections by the Department of Public Safety; and at the time when the Tornillo Port of Entry was open, and we were able to do an analysis of before and after. And we did see that traffic shifted, just like Jeff described. Of course this is a very limited sample, but it basically supported what Jeff just mentioned.

Allan Rutter (23:29):
Well, it sounds like you guys in the El Paso office are helping planners in the El Paso region consider changes that result from truck movements and how to mitigate all that change.

Rafael Aldrete (23:42):
That’s correct. And traffic here is different. Primarily what we see here is, basically, within … the traffic stays within the larger binational metropolitan area. Most of this truck traffic is traffic that originates locally in Ciudad Juarez; crosses to El Paso; picks up cargo in El Paso or drops off cargo in El Paso; and returns to Juarez. So, most of the trucks that are crossing the border are actually what we call dredge trucks. And those are trucks that are domiciled in the Ciudad Juarez area primarily; they are Mexican carriers. So, the traffic in here is very different. The patterns are different. Like Jeff was describing, historically, the way that Juarez developed, a lot of those maquiladoras were close to the Bridge of the Americas. And we saw this issue come up in 2015, when we did a regulatory plan for the World Bank and the municipalities of Juarez, where it was very clear that there was a lot of legacy industry that maquiladoras had had in these areas for a long time.

Rafael Aldrete (24:38):
Industrial areas blended with residential areas. And that’s certainly a problem in the long run because maybe the streets are not designed for that purpose and so on. And so far, we have been discussing the northbound because that’s what we know the most about. But there’s no agency that is collecting data for how much traffic is going southbound other than Mexican Aduanas. So, there are no official counts that are published because Aduanas doesn’t publish that data. Nobody knows how many vehicles are crossing southbound. So, I think the concern is not so much where are the 500 trucks per day that cross northbound going to go, because 500 is relatively small compared to the rest of the traffic we see in the other crossings, or the capacity of the other crossings. But what happens with the traffic that goes southbound? Is this a big problem or not? Because if it’s a small amount, I guess the impact of moving them would not be as large as if there are many. And I think that’s at the crux now of the analysis that stakeholders are going through with this environmental impact statement. I’d say, there are lots of questions that still need an answer, and that’s primarily the position right now of the planning agency here, the El Paso MPO. They want to see more data before they can get behind one of the alternatives.

Jeff Shelton (25:53):
You know, and I’m the modeler, so I’m the one that builds and models, and we have a lot of data from northbound to calibrate. It’s like Rafa mentioned, the southbound is a little more difficult. So, you know, it’s kind of guesstimate for now.

Allan Rutter (26:04):
Well, it sounds like the good news is that the stakeholders in El Paso, the leaders, have attracted this money for GSA to do something about BOTA. Hurray! $600 million. That’s good. One of the things we’ve described today is what we know and what we don’t know yet. I think the other thing–as more attention is being paid to southbound, the good news for El Paso is that, Rafa, you and Jeff are on the side of the MPO and the other stakeholders; is as we get that data, we’re gonna do something with it. And, hopefully, it’ll help people understand the consequences of the alternatives that are being offered so that that $600 million can go to its best possible use.

Jeff Shelton (26:53):
Well, I think I can speak for both of us. You know, this is not just a project for us. We live here. So, this impacts us every day. So we wanna make sure we get it right and we know what’s going on and we have the correct data. <laugh>.

Allan Rutter (27:05):
Yeah, these aren’t just sponsors, they’re your neighbors.

Jeff Shelton (27:08):
<laugh>. No, right?

Rafael Aldrete (27:10):
And we’re always trying to look ahead of us and see what, you know, what tools could be used, you know, to solve analyses that may not be important today, but that are going to be needed in the future. So, at the very least, that’s part of the role we played here. We’ve been here working with agencies and basically letting them know from our standpoint as researchers that applying some of these analysis techniques and tools they can use to solve challenges like this for the benefit of our sponsors. I think that’s part also for our motivation here as researchers.

Allan Rutter (27:42):
And also, what I know in the short amount of time that I’ve been at TTI, one of the reasons why we have all that northbound data is that you guys have demonstrated the capacity of different measurement techniques and different ways of extracting that data. So–doing some important work both for the region and for your neighbors, which has gotta be fairly rewarding. I think I hear that. What are some other reasons that the two of you show up for work every day? Jeff, let me let you start.

Jeff Shelton (28:13):
I love what I do. You know, my wife makes a joke that I play video games for a living <laugh>. She tells people that. I tell her it’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s kind of how I look at it. You know, I come to work and I build models, I forecast traffic, I look in the future, and I’m not just talking about a single bridge sometimes. I’m talking about, you know, mega regions. I model Houston. I model Dallas. So, you know, it’s really cool if I can give the DOT and the MPOs answers that they can’t answer themselves. So that’s why I come to work every day. ‘Cause I love what I do.

Rafael Aldrete (28:50):
Yeah. For me, you know, it’s because I get to work with people like Jeff, people like a lot of other colleagues that we have not only here in El Paso, but elsewhere in TTI. And having this network being associated with them does help us make a positive impact, not only here in El Paso, but in other places. I think the work that we are doing does have an impact that doesn’t stay local. It goes elsewhere. That’s really the reason that makes me happy to come to work every day.

Allan Rutter (29:16):
Well, I’m grateful for you guys spending some time with us today to describe some of the important work that you guys are uniquely capable of doing and the impact that it’s having there in your region and among your neighbors. Thanks so much for participating in today’s conversation, guys.

Jeff Shelton (29:37):
Thank you, Allan.

Rafael Aldrete (29:39):
Thank you Allan.

Allan Rutter (29:42):
This discussion demonstrates how TTI researchers are involved in understanding how transportation, infrastructure, and facilities across the Texas-Mexico border are used by a range of modal customers. And then applying that understanding to evaluate scenarios of changing capacities and functions of that infrastructure. Traffic and trade across our border not only affects the millions of people living on both sides of the Rio Grande–it affects the economy of our state and nation as a whole.

Allan Rutter (30:14):
Thanks for listening. Please take just a minute to give us a review, subscribe, and share this episode. And please join us next time for another conversation about getting ourselves and the stuff we need from point A to point B. Thinking Transportation is a production of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, a member of The Texas A&M University System. The show is edited and produced by Chris Pourteau. I’m your host, Allan Rutter. Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you again next time.