Advanced Transportation Congestion Management Technology Deployment (ATCMTD) at the US-Canada Border Reduced Delay at Border Crossings by up to 46 Percent.

METHODOLOGY

The project used a before-and-after analysis to evaluate the regional transportation data and decision-support system, collecting continuous data for the following performance measures: (i) simultaneous border delay at two or more crossings (a five-minute interval where delay for vehicles is 30 minutes or greater), (ii) incident response and clearance times, (iii) Travel Time Index (TTI) and Planning Time Index (PTI) for 12 links across four expressways, (iv) normalized border delay, (v) on-time transit performance, (vi) commercial vehicle operations event sharing, and (vii) number of agencies populating and receiving data.

The baseline data were collected before the deployment of the ATCMTD on June 1, 2024. The post-deployment data from 2024 were then compared with the corresponding periods in 2023 to assess changes from the baseline period.

FINDINGS

Simultaneous Border Delays

• Simultaneous border delays for trucks decreased in June–August by 46 percent for U.S.-bound traffic and by 37 percent for Canada-bound traffic. In September–November, simultaneous delays decreased by 20 percent for U.S.-bound truck traffic. Although delays for Canada-bound truck traffic increased by 75 percent during September–November, the actual numerical increase remained very low.

• Simultaneous border delays for cars decreased in June-August by 19 percent for US-bound traffic, and by 30 percent in September-November. Delays for Canada-bound traffic decreased by 15 percent in both timeframes.

Incident Response and Clearance Times

• Incident response time dropped by roughly three minutes. Crash clearance times remained similar to the baseline.

TTI and PTI

• TTI and PTI remained similar.

Normalized Border Delay

• Average delay for passenger vehicles to the US decreased for the Peace Bridge and Lewiston-Queenston Bridge, with delays ranging from five to 12 minutes. Average delay increased slightly for Rainbow Bridge, but only in the September-November period.

• Average delay for passenger vehicles to Canada decreased for the Peace Bridge and Lewiston-Queenston Bridge, with the delay ranging from four to seven minutes. Average delay increased slightly for Rainbow Bridge in the June-August period.

On-time Transit Performance

• On-time transit performance during the evaluation was 81.9 percent, an improvement of 0.9 percent.

Commercial Vehicle Operations Event Sharing

The average number of events impacting commercial vehicle operations was 96.6, 28 percent more events than the baseline.