Dual Airport

From Yahoo:

"California newest airport terminal extends to Mexico"

 

The U.S.-Mexico border is one of the world's most fortified international divides. Starting Wednesday, it will also be one of the only that has an airport straddling two countries. An investor group that includes Chicago billionaire Sam Zell built a sleek terminal in San Diego with a bridge that crosses a razor-wire border fence to Tijuana's decades-old airport. Passengers pay $18 to walk a 390-feet (119-meter) overpass to Tijuana International Airport, a springboard about 30 Mexican destinations. Target customers are the estimated 60 percent of Tijuana airport passengers who come to the United States, about 2.6 million last year. Now they drive about 15 minutes to a congested land crossing, where they wait up to several hours to enter San Diego by car or on foot. The airport bridge is a five-minute walk to a U.S. border inspector. The only other cross-border airport known to industry experts is in the European Union — between Basel, Switzerland, and France's Upper Rhine region — but it carries none of the political freight of San Diego and Tijuana. Mexicans who ran across the border illegally overwhelmed the Border Patrol until the mid-1990s, when new fences and additional agents heralded a massive surge in U.S. enforcement on the 1,954-mile (3144-kilometer) line with Mexico. Cross Border Xpress, one of the largest privately-operated U.S. air terminals, wouldn't have happened if Tijuana didn't build its airport a few steps from the international line in the 1950s or if it wasn't surrounded by undeveloped land in a barren, industrial part of San Diego.  Passengers enter a courtyard with a reflecting pool to an airy building with ticket counters and kiosks. High, white ceilings have large orange circles of recessed lighting. Sparse decorative touches are onyx, including high-hanging black slabs near ticket counters and white spheres atop the escalators.

Aesthetics are more dated in the Tijuana airport but passenger flow is the same. Ticketed passengers must carry luggage across a bridge with frosted glass windows to border inspectors in the receiving country and a wall in the middle to separate the two directions.

 

 

^ It doesn't  seem like to will make much of a difference except for the few people who use it. I could see this being used a lot on the Canadian-US border, but not the Mexican-US border.  ^

http://news.yahoo.com/california-newest-airport-terminal-extends-mexico-133549300.html