Title: Bi-National Delay Pattern Analysis For Commercial and Passenger Vehicles at Niagara Frontier Border,
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.