Cross-border freight movements in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Region, with insights from passive GPS data

Abstract

The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence binational region is one of the most significant concentrations of industrial production on earth and contains the most active corridors for goods movements in the Canada-United States trade relationship. The history of industrial development in this region involves the exploitation of coal and iron ore for steel production, the development of the railroads and the expansion of commercial agriculture, and the growth of the automotive and other high value-added manufacturing industries. Canadian and American industrial complexes became increasingly integrated with the support of trade agreements in the latter decades of the 20 th century. Development of cross-border supply chains led to massive international flows of intermediate goods. In this context, the performance of a few key border crossings is of critical economic importance. New information drawn from very large datasets of Global Positioning System records generated by cross-border truck movements sheds new light on both the spatial patterns of cross-border goods movement and the performance of border crossings.