How long is the motorcycle wait at San Ysidro?

By Alan Scott · Who makes this · Tijuana, Baja California

There is no number. And not for lack of looking.

On September 8, 2026, a motorcycle-only entrance opened at San Ysidro. Since then a lot of people have been searching for the motorcycle wait time.

CBP does not publish a wait time for motorcycles. It didn't before the new entrance, and it doesn't now.

Every number on this site comes straight from CBP. If they don't measure it, we can't invent it — and we won't.

What CBP did announce

CBP's stated reason: the entrance "will improve traffic flow and increase operational efficiency for travelers."

That's the whole announcement. No wait time, and no claim about how much time anyone saves.

🔴 The part almost nobody is mentioning: it's 6 hours a day

Monday to Friday, 4 a.m. to 10 a.m.

Do the math: that's 30 hours out of the 168 in a week.

82% of the week, that entrance is closed.

Ride across on a Saturday, a Sunday, or on a weekday at eleven in the morning, and the new entrance does nothing for you — you go where you went before.

That isn't a complaint. It's the fine print you need before you move your departure time.

What number to use meanwhile

The four wait times CBP does publish for San Ysidro are General, Ready Lane, SENTRI and pedestrian. On a motorcycle, the closest thing to your situation is the lane you'd be entering through anyway — the same one you'd use in a car, depending on your enrollment.

🔴 But treat it as a reference, not as your time. A motorcycle doesn't queue like a car, and no published figure measures that.

For scale — same figures as the Spanish version, not re-derived here: at San Ysidro the General lane normally runs 85 minutes, SENTRI 14. On a bad day General hits 105, and the worst we have measured is 195 minutes.

Here are San Ysidro's wait times right now

What we can't tell you, and would rather say out loud

We cannot measure whether the new entrance helped.

To know, we'd have to compare motorcycle wait times before and after — and that number doesn't exist at either end. The effect on the General lane would be far too small to separate from the normal noise of a day.

Anyone who tells you how many minutes the new entrance saves you is making it up.

What we can do is what we do with everything else: if CBP ever starts publishing that number, it will be here, with the time they measured it. And if they never publish it, this page will keep saying it doesn't exist.

Where this comes from

• The U.S. Customs and Border Protection announcement, carried by Tijuana and San Diego press on September 3, 2026
• Current wait times: CBP · bwt.cbp.gov
• Historical averages: SANDAG, open data

We are not affiliated with CBP or SANDAG.

If you ride across and see something different from what's on this page, tell us. This page gets corrected.