border-crossing tax

a friend of mine recently sent me a news link regarding america's decision to "study" the merits of introducing a land crossing charge at the us/canada borders. no specific amount has been proposed. one article had randomly used $5.50 per person per entry. if you had a full car with 4 adults, that's an extra $22 per car.

charging to enter the country isn't new. if you look at the fare breakdown on an airline flight, for example, you'll find many different immigration/customs fees:

if you were flying domestically within the states, the fees are much fewer. the following screenshot is from a dummy booking on united, SEA-LAX:

delta airlines provides a nicely formatted table that lists the various charges. the federal transportation tax is already built into the cost of the ticket price on the us-based airlines. doing the math, airline travel across the border would incur an agriculture fee, US immigration user fee, and a US federal customs fee. taken together, each flight into america costs $18.40. yet, despite the cost, i haven't complained about it so far. i wonder whether that will change in the near future.

i don't imagine that they will impose a border fee anytime soon, if at all. it seems like such a short term cash grab while ignoring the revenue that is gained from those impulsive cross border trips. and indeed, there are border businesses which thrive off of cross-border roadtrips. gas in blaine, washington last weekend was $3.99/gallon, or $1.054/liter. in vancouver, gas is about $1.33/liter. (in seattle, it was $0.948/liter.) business such as 24/7 parcels in blaine, washington would quickly die out as a $5-10 per passenger charge would quickly negate any potential savings. and the poor costco in bellingham won't have an influx of canadians trying to clean them out of their dairy products.

but if they did impose a fee, i'm sure that a (worst case scenario of) $18.40 per person fee would stop some people from going. i'm sure that it would strongly discourage the daytrip folks. those folks who were willing to pay an extra 12% (no duty free exemption for stays less than 24 hours) for lower-priced american products may not tolerate an additional fee. but provided that the fee is nominal, like 5-10$ a person, i'm not sure that it will affect my own road trip behaviour. my mentality has always been to make such roadtrips as a weekend away from home. to make up for it, i may pass up on other expensive options instead. maybe cut my shopping budget a little bit more. maybe i'll sink low enough to be one of those housekeeping cart raiders.

as a side note, as a nexus card holder, since we've saved the system money, maybe the nexus lanes should be exempt from these fees. after all, it does cost time (and thus money) for regular border agents to harass you about what you had for dinner, why you would want to visit your friends who live in a different city, or how it is that you're related to your brother who has the same last name as you do.

we will have to see whether a fee will come to be in the end.