Border crossingsiPhone app lets border crossers determine best time to cross U.S. border
Excessive border waits cause $2.5 billion in losses annually to the San Diego regional economy, with typical two-hour delays for trucks at commercial crossings into San Diego County costing the county $455 million in annual revenue from reduced freight activity; new “crowdsourced” information app allows motorists to decide the best time to cross the border by car or truck; the app’s information is meshed with the data on wait times at the border from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to improve the accuracy of the wait times
Next time you drive into the United States from Mexico or Canada, you may want to open a new iPhone app and provide an eyewitness account of how long you have to wait. This “crowdsourced” information will then be made instantly available to other motorists and help future border crossers to decide the best time to cross the border by car or truck. This iReport data is meshed with the data on wait times at the border from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to improve the accuracy of the wait times.
The new “Best Time to Cross the Border” mobile app is now available in the Apple App store on iTunes.
“It includes all of the features first made available to Android app users last April, and in addition, the crowdsourcing component called iReport is also available on the iPhone,” said Ganz Chockalingam, principal development engineer in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), which publishes both apps, as well as California Wireless Traffic Report apps for iPhone and Android.
“Only commuters who are physically near a port can report wait times for that port,” added Chockalingam. “The app has only been available for a few days, and already commuters have started using this feature and we’ve been collecting user reported wait time data.”
A University of California, San Diego release reports that Chockalingam oversaw a team of graduate and undergraduate students from UC San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering department, who built the iPhone app, including the crowdsourcing feature that allows commuters to report wait times. They included senior Matthew Davis and junior Rodrigo Rallo, and Master’s student Tarfah Alrashed. Tarfah is also a researcher at King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology (KACST), a government research lab in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Mike Chiu, who is a programmer analyst at Calit2, developed the Web portal.
“The students did a tremendous job with the whole design, development and implementation process of the app,” said Chockalingam. “They were extremely motivated in developing a real-world application that could help thousands of commuters. They also did a phenomenal job of pooling their resources and releasing the app in less than three months’ time.”
Some of the early online reviews for the “Best Time to Cross the Border” for iPhone have applauded the new app: “Amazing app! So helpful!” “As a Mexican, I find this app extremely helpful… and I’m pretty sure it’ll be
