By Ana Gomez Salcido
Cross Border Xpress, the Tijuana airport border crossing in San Diego, will expand its facilities to include more parking spaces due to an increasing demand.
“This is one of the necessities we have, we are adding 550 parking spaces,” said CBX CEO Raul Revuelta. “It was one of the subjects we needed to address, they need to be functioning by this year’s Thanksgiving.”
The binational facilities opened in December 2015 with 700 stalls and just started a million dollar investment to include new parking spaces, CBX Chief Commercial Officer Elizabeth Brown informed.
CBX is an enclosed pedestrian bridge for Tijuana Airport passengers crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. With a valid boarding pass and a CBX ticket, users can cross the pedestrian border bridge in each direction, avoiding long waits at ports of entry.
CBX serves the approximately 2.4 million passengers who already cross the border as part of their travels. Spanning 390 feet, the CBX skywalk is the first ever to connect a the United States directly into a foreign airport terminal.
“The first benefit of CBX is for Southern California residents. There is no other airport here that has the number of direct flights or connections like the Tijuana airport to Mexican destinations,” Revuelta mentioned. “There are 33 direct destinations in Mexico including flights to Mexico City and Guadalajara every hour.”
One of the destinations that the Tijuana airport offers is a direct flight to Shanghai, and starting from January 2017, there will be an additional flight to China.
“Right know there are more users crossing from Mexico to United States because of long waits at the ports of entry,” said Revuelta. “The number of users changes depending on the dates. On Labor Day weekend, there were more people using CBX to go south than north.”
According to CBX data, there are over 850,000 people that have used their binational facilities since their opening on December 9, 2015. Revuelta mentioned that the month with the highest usage was last July with over 150,000 users.
Revuelta mentioned that there were a lot of families using the CBX facilities during the summer, and that the type of users vary throughout the rest of the year such as businessmen that use the bridge.
The Tijuana airport has seen a growth in passengers from January to May 2016 by 32 percent, in comparison to January to May 2015, Brown said, and it is attributed to CBX.
CBX offers three kinds of tickets: one way tickets are $16, for round trip tickets are $30, and a family pass is $55. The tickets can be purchased online or in person at the CBX terminal in San Diego or at the Tijuana Airport skywalk entrance. The family pass can only be purchased on site.