Bi-National Delay Pattern Analysis For Commercial and Passenger Vehicles at Niagara Frontier Border

TL;DR

This study analyzes border crossing delay patterns at Niagara Frontier, identifying key factors influencing congestion at three ports for commercial and passenger vehicles using decision trees.

Contribution

It introduces a decision tree-based approach to uncover significant factors affecting border delays and provides insights for improving traffic management at the border crossings.

Findings

LQ and PB are more congested during Canadian holidays for passenger vehicles to the USA.

RB experiences higher congestion for passenger vehicles in summer, likely due to tourism.

PB is consistently more congested for commercial trucks to the USA.

Abstract

Border crossing delays between New York State and Southern Ontario cause problems like enormous economic loss and massive environmental pollutions. In this area, there are three border-crossing ports: Peace Bridge (PB), Rainbow Bridge (RB) and Lewiston-Queenston Bridge (LQ) at Niagara Frontier border. The goals of this paper are to figure out whether the distributions of bi-national wait times for commercial and passenger vehicles are evenly distributed among the three ports and uncover the hidden significant influential factors that result in the possible insufficient utilization. The historical border wait time data from 7:00 to 21:00 between 08/22/2016 and 06/20/2017 are archived, as well as the corresponding temporal and weather data. For each vehicle type towards each direction, a Decision Tree is built to identify the various border delay patterns over the three bridges. We find that for the passenger vehicles to the USA, the convenient connections between the Canada freeways with USA I-190 by LQ and PB may cause these two bridges more congested than RB, especially when it is a holiday in Canada. For the passenger vehicles in the other bound, RB is much more congested than LQ and PB in some cases, and the visitors to Niagara Falls in the USA in summer may be a reason. For the commercial trucks to the USA, the various delay patterns show PB is always more congested than LQ. Hour interval and weekend are the most significant factors appearing in all the four Decision Trees. These Decision Trees can help the authorities to make specific routing suggestions when the corresponding conditions are satisfied.