Lowering fees at Zaragoza eliminates some trucks from Chamizal

For decades, Chamizal neighborhood residents have been dealing with commercial trucks in the area.

City Council received an update this week on a program designed to get truck drivers to use other bridges. Since June, the City’s International Bridges Department has lowered fees at the Zaragoza Port of Entry, in an attempt to get those who use the free Bridge of the Americas to try another.

But is it working?

“There are different strategies that you implement to manage truck traffic,” said Mathew McElroy, who heads up the City’s International Bridges Department. “Remember you are talking about hundreds of thousands of trucks.”

One of the strategies being used over the past three months to try and limit truck traffic in the Chamizal neighborhood is lowering truck fees 50-cents at the Zaragoza Port of Entry.

“We’re only seeing 3,000-ish trucks a month that we moved over, but 3,000 less trucks in the Chamizal neighborhood is good, especially if you’re bringing them over at not peak times at Zaragoza,” McElroy said.

“So we’re getting the results that we wanted. We’re gonna drop prices again, to hope that we continue to pull a little bit more truck traffic, because the Chamizal neighborhood benefits.”

Even though it amounts to about a hundred trucks fewer per day, those living in the Chamizal area told ABC-7 they’ve noticed very little difference in the number of trucks traveling through their neighborhood and across the Bridge of the Americas.

“For us its still the same,” said Hilda Villegas, who lives in the Chamizal area and is a committee member of Familias Unidas del Chamizal. “it could be 3,000 less a month, but you still see maybe another 3,000 more trucks come through our neighborhoods.”

Villegas said lowering fees at other bridges is a good idea, but the only way to eliminate trucks traveling through her neighborhood would be to eliminate commercial traffic completely from the Bridge of the Americas.

“If they still keep it free, we’re still going to see those trucks,” Villegas said. “They’re still going have another option to go through and they are still go through our communities.”

McElroy said any decision to eliminate commercial traffic from the Bridge of the Americas would require council action and a process involving both the U.S. and Mexico to remove the Chamizal treaty, which established the bridge would be free to all.