Cutting border wait times without adding staff: UBC study

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VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – It’s the weekend and many people will likely be heading to the US, but new research from UBC shows border wait times could be a lot shorter.

It suggests those times could be cut by 18 per cent without adding any new staff. “The math can end up telling you things which you hadn’t thought about in advance,” says Professor Robin Lindsey, one of the people behind this research.

Analysts used queuing theory and optimization to examine the number of booths that were open during the day and how to efficiently use them.

Lindsey says long lines or queuing is the problem and the Canada Border Services Agency could be more proactive with its staff. “What we’ve found is that if you can reschedule them earlier you can prevent the queuing on more days and that means that you can get away with fewer people in the evening.”

Lindsey does say the study doesn’t have all the information needed for a complete analysis, but the CBSA might be able to learn something from the data. “The appropriate policy to deal with queuing to minimize on average queuing delays can be rather different that simple intuition might suggest and that’s where this sort of data-driven, highly technical research can come out.”

He did caution the 18 per cent figure doesn’t take into account things like real world labour situations such as vacation requests or the time it takes to screen different groups of people like Canadians coming back from the US on shopping trips.

LISTEN: Reporter Kenny Mason joins anchors Amanda Wawryk and Jim Bennie 

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