By Ignacio Ibarra
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
Omni Cable of Nogales, Sonora, has a single channel that alternates views of the city's two border crossings into the United States. |
Photos by A.E. Araiza / Staff
Cibervision was first to offer the traffic monitoring and has separate channels for each port. It brought the idea to Nogales after using it at a Texas port. |
Photos by A.E. Araiza / Staff Manuel Fernandez, an Omni Cable customer and businessman, is a big fan of the traffic channel. "It's very useful," he says. |
Jaime Juaristi Santos, Cibervision's general manager, said up to 80 percent of customers check the traffic channels each day. |
Nogales cable offers 24-hour look at traffic
NOGALES, Sonora - Mexican television is known more for steamy soaps and variety shows, but one of the hottest things on cable these days is idle traffic.
Who's watching? Just about anyone facing the often time-consuming journey through the city's two ports of entry on the way to shopping, friends or business north of the border, say the two cable companies that provide competing live views of traffic at the ports.
"It really helps," said Ana Lorenza Tovar. "If we need to go across, we put that channel on and see if the lines are long. It helps us to plan and I think it saves my family a lot of time."
Depending on what the channel shows, she said, the Tovar family decides whether to stick to their travel plans, wait or scrap the trip.
The service has also been a boon to people like Jose Miramontes Gutierrez, who works with a local produce transport company and relies on moving products through the port as quickly as possible.
"We ship mostly perishable goods, so I regularly monitor the television images to see how traffic is flowing," Miramontes said. "My family uses the service to plan trips across the border, especially on weekends, when so many people come up from the south and the crossing gets very busy."
With more than 11,000 vehicles crossings into the United States at Nogales each day, getting through the border quickly is seldom easy. In the last fiscal year, more than 3,962,745 passenger vehicles entered the United States through the two Nogales ports. Nearly 242,000 commercial trucks crossed the border as well, mainly at the Mariposa port of entry west of Nogales.
"Nogales is by far the busiest port of entry in Arizona," said Roger Maier, a U.S. Customs Service spokesman in El Paso. "San Luis is second, with nearly 1 million fewer crossing."
The trip got even more difficult after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when increased security measures have at times resulted in traffic being backed up for miles and stretched the wait for hours.
The popularity of the traffic channels may rise even more if the United States goes to war with Iraq, bringing with it the expectation of even stiffer security and longer lines.
The long lines at Nogales and other ports along the border prompted the U.S. Customs Service to list average wait times on its Internet site. A year and a half later, the Internet site is still operating, updating information twice a day.
When it comes to watching border traffic, Nogales residents seem to prefer reality TV.
Manuel Fernandez, an Omni Cable customer, said, "I'm a businessman and I use this service every day. It's very useful."
Cibervision, the smaller and newer of two cable companies operating in Nogales, was the first to mount video cameras at the city's two ports of entry, launching the service about a month after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The traffic channels were an immediate hit with customers, said Cibervision General Manager Jaime Juaristi Santos. He said as many as 80 percent of his customers tune in to images of the Mariposa or Dennis DeConcini ports of entry at some point in the day.
More importantly, he says, more than half the drivers headed north tuned in to check the traffic flow, or asked someone at home or the office to do it for them before heading for the border.
The customer response was no surprise. It was the same at Piedras Negras, across from Eagle Pass, Texas, another busy border crossing where a traffic channel was introduced even before the terrorist attacks.
"On the border, the lines are something we live with every day," said Juaristi. "Sept. 11 was a factor, but we knew it was a service that was popular with our other customers, so we decided to offer it here."
A few months after the traffic channel appeared on Cibervision, Omni Cable, Mexico's oldest cable provider and one of the largest in the region, set up it's own cameras at the ports.
Neither Cibervision nor Omni Cable will disclose the size of their customer bases, citing their ongoing competition, but both companies say that nearly every home in this city of nearly 300,000 people - even in the poorest neighborhoods - has a television, and it's likely connected to the cable service they provide.
On Omni Cable, images from pole-mounted cameras provide round-the-clock views of the ports. Images of the two ports alternate every few seconds while public service announcements and ads scroll across the bottom of the screen. Cibervision gives each port its own channel.
"We've been providing the service for about six or seven months now, initially with a single camera at the downtown port. A month and a half later, at the request of our customers, we set up a second camera at Mariposa," said Gustavo de la Fuente, administrative director for Omni Cable.
Both managers said they didn't know the cost of providing the service, but noted it is small compared to the benefit to their customers and the community.
* Contact reporter Ignacio Ibarra at (520) 432-2766 or nacho1@mindspring.com.