Project status: Completed
IMTC participants have identified the need to periodically evaluate commercial vehicle operations (CVO) at the Cascade Gateway’s three ports-of-entry as a priority for informing regional investment strategies, and to analyze the impacts of changes to road and inspection systems.
Three commercial ports-of-entry in the Cascade Gateway system of border crossings: Pacific Highway, Lynden/Aldergrove, and Sumas/Abbotsford-Huntingdon.
In 1997, the WA State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) received $1.3 million from the U.S. Federal Highway Administration to apply Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technologies to border operations at the Washington /British Columbia border. WSDOT developed an in-bond system designed to monitor and facilitate the movement of northbound trucks carrying containerized, in-bond freight along I-5 and through the Pacific Highway port-of-entry. The system used a standard transponder tag to track in-bond containers trucked from the ports of Seattle or Tacoma into Canada. The tags, which were the same used for Washington’s weigh-in-motion system, utilized the unique tag serial number to reference carrier and vehicle credentials, as well as cargo invoice information and manifest data.
This project provided a system similar to Phase I in the southbound direction, from the Port of Vancouver to the U.S. – Canada border crossing. The project was funded by Transport Canada, U.S. Federal Highway Administration, B.C. Ministry of Transportation, and WSDOT. Communication and information technology integrated U.S. and Canadian commercial vehicle border export data systems to provide advanced export information to customs agencies at the Pacific Highway border crossing. Similar to the northbound system, Phase II integrated tag readers with weigh-in-motion technology to allow enrolled vehicles the opportunity to bypass the weigh scale at Port Mann.
Building on current ITS-CVO deployments, this project developed a concept of operations to evolve and expand the functional capabilities of the existing ITS projects. The concept determines the best path to increase the volume of pre-processed, cross-border shipments and perhaps to associate electronic driver identification data with the cargo and truck transponder systems. Part of this phase included an analysis of ITS processing at the Pacific Highway port-of-entry.
The cost of the study was $150,000. Funding partners include:
U.S. Federal Highway Administration
Transport Canada
B.C. Ministry of Transportation
Border Policy Research Institute (WWU)
Contact Hugh Conroy, Director, Whatcom Council of Governments by email or phone (360-685-8382).