Case study
BorderBot
Live border crossing wait times for the Tijuana-San Diego border. AI reads camera feeds and tells you exactly how long until you cross.
BorderBot predicts border crossing wait times at the US-Mexico border between Tijuana and San Diego. The app watches live camera feeds from the San Ysidro and Otay Mesa ports of entry, analyzes the traffic using image recognition, and gives you a real-time estimate of how long the line is. Open the app, check the wait, and decide when to leave.
The official CBP (Customs and Border Protection) wait times are updated every hour at best, and they're often wrong. BorderBot updates every few minutes based on what the cameras actually show. If the line suddenly backed up 20 minutes ago, BorderBot knows. The government estimate won't reflect that for another hour.
Tens of thousands of people cross the Tijuana-San Diego border every day: workers commuting to jobs in San Diego, students attending SDSU or UCSD, families visiting relatives, and shoppers heading to Plaza Rio or Las Americas. For these daily crossers, saving 30 minutes by timing the crossing right makes a real difference.
I built BorderBot while living in the San Diego-Tijuana area. I was crossing the border regularly and got tired of showing up to a 2-hour line when I could have waited 45 minutes and crossed in 20. The government data was useless, so I trained a model to read the camera feeds and predict wait times based on actual visual traffic density.
BorderBot works on mobile and gives a simple answer to a simple question: should I cross now or wait? No graphs, no charts, just the estimated wait time in minutes for each lane (general, SENTRI, Ready Lane) at each port of entry.