NY trucking leaders seeking traffic flow plan for future Canadian border backups

Trucking leaders in New York are looking into plans to improve traffic flow ahead of any future Canadian border backups like the one last week. 

The closure of the border between Canada and New York began on September 29th and was not resolved until October 1st, creating serious truck traffic backups. Officials say the backups were caused by a failed computer update. Now, New York trucking leaders are looking to plan for any future backups by creating more effective plan to handle any truck traffic overflow. 

“They’ve [the Canadian border] got an old IT infrastructure. Very antiquated. And so the more commerce you do electronically, the more difficulty the system has, and so this is is kind of what’s going on. That’s why you had the outage, and I would expect to probably see more outages in the future, just because they’re just in the beginning stages of trying to modernize,” said Syracuse professor Patrick Penfield.

“It was hours of waiting for some trucks. Officers were working overtime, and additional staff were brought in to deal with the backlog,” said President Mark Weber of the Customs and Immigration Union in Ottawa. 

President of Speed Global Services, Joe Berti, says that he did his best to accomodate some of the stranded trucks in his yard, but says trucking leaders need to come up with a more comprehensive plan in order to accommodate more trucks. 

“Proactively now, thinking about it to work with the DOT, work with NITTEC to see how could we get the traffic to flow into not just our yards but any other available yards. And I think that’s something that the state DOT, customs — I’m not sure who — what jurisdiction would work on that, but should start thinking about it,” Berti said. 

Some truck driver who were caught in the backups say that there also needs to be a better plan in place for receiving communication from the Canadian government, as it was difficult to get any information during the border crossing issues, reported WGRZ.

Canadian officials are also reportedly looking to discuss their own contingency plans.