Commercial trucks - most with five axles - queue by the mile from Mexico through the Otay Mesa commercial port of entry. But it could be easier than getting from East L.A. to Santa Monica.

Otay Mesa is California’s busiest commercial port of entry. In 2006, $28.6 billion in import and export goods moved through Otay on nearly 1.5 million truck trips. About 21 percent of those trips had San Diego as origin or destination, 57 percent moved from or to other California counties, and 22 percent had cargo headed to or from other states or even other countries.

The commercial vehicle inspection area — about a half mile away from Otay’s passenger processing area — funnels all those trucks through nine primary processing gates and 100 secondary inspection spaces from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekends and holidays.

Otay opened in 1985 just six miles east of San Ysidro, the nation’s busiest border gateway, to alleviate the bottleneck especially for trucks. Today, Otay handles more than 90 percent of the commercial truck traffic entering San Diego. And Otay itself can be a bottleneck.

Now environmental studies are in review to extend the road infrastructure two miles fArther to an East Otay port of entry to open by 2015.

“We need a relief valve for San Ysidro and Otay Mesa, and we have an opportunity now for the land on East Otay,” says Mark Baza, Caltrans project manager. The proposed 100-acre site is outside San Diego city limits in unincorporated East Otay Mesa.

A 2.5-mile, four-lane state highway (State Route 11) would be built to connect the new port to existing highways, including SR 125 and 905 at an estimated cost of $360 million. The new route ultimately would be financed by tolls. A toll road between Tijuana and Tecate already exists just southeast of East Otay, and Baza says Mexican studies for the new port are proceeding on schedule.

The Caltrans planning budget will be drawn from a portion of $400 million in Proposition 1B trade corridor improvement funding in San Diego recommended by the state Transportation Commission. The federal General Services Administration will lead the design and construction of the port itself, estimated at $300 million.

The new port cannot open soon enough for many freight operators. The wait for commercial trucks can sometimes exceed four hours at Otay today and volume is expected to double to 2.8 million trucks annually by 2025. Five-axle trucks make up about two-thirds of the truck volume and the queue length can exceed one mile.

Then again, Los Angeles traffic can be worse.

A trucker leaves the Otay Mesa CHP facility. (Photo courtesy CrossborderBusiness.com.)

The Mexican side of the port has its own export compound and inspection booths. Extremely limited air transport at Brown Field and by rail means trucks transport almost all commercial goods in the two-way maquiladora traffic of components and finished goods.

All that truckin’ is good business for Corrugados de Baja California, the Tijuana affiliate of the Orange County Container Group. The company makes shipping cartons and industrial point-of-purchase packaging and has grown to be a $340 million a year business with border plants from California to Texas, says Antonieta Gomez, Corrugados’ Tijuana sales manager. Sales grew 5 percent last year.

Corrugados stocks its 140,000-square-foot warehouse to specialize in Vendor Managed Inventory and Just in Time Delivery — two key precepts in lean manufacturing. “We’re right across the border (from Otay),” says Gomez. “We can deliver within a couple of hours.”

Also serving the freight lines and a key part of the lean manufacturing chain are many warehousing companies that store goods near maquiladora customers for timely delivery by truck.

Moving more Mexican border freight has become a new initiative for FedEx. Although the company has had an Otay Mesa presence for years, in September it opened a 15,000-square-foot worldwide services center that augments its existing Otay locations, for FedEx Trade Network and FedEx Freight.