Image by Bernd Dittrich for Unsplash
August 27, 2024
Last week, the city of Pharr made a crucial announcement to international logistics. The city’s international bridge, connecting the U.S. and Mexico, is getting a crucial expansion.
Now, the city government, together with the Pharr International Bridge, will expand the current access point to the U.S., costing an approximate 44 million USD. The project itself was much of a foregone conclusion, as the Mexican government has been building half of the bridge expansion for over a year now, hoping to increase imports and exports capacity for the country. The U.S. side of the bridge, however, hadn’t been officially announced until last week. In total, the project is expected to add an additional four lanes of transit to the border crossing point.
Pharr is already a crucial point for international trade, connecting the U.S. state of Texas with the Mexican city of Reynosa in the state of Tamaulipas. Historically, looking at the total number of crossings since 1996, Pharr has maintained its prominence as the fourth most important border crossing point between the two nations. In fact, during the time examined, it is estimates that some 640.3 million crossings took place in the Pharr international crossing—that’s more than the populations of Mexico and the US combined.
Most important, however, is just how meaningful Pharr is for commerce. The above figure includes all types of crossings, including pedestrians and personal vehicles. Instead, it is worth looking just at truck traffic—since trucks account for 87.3% of the transportation GDP in the country. According to the most recent figures from the Pharr International Bridge itself, over 1.3 million trucks have crossed the border through Pharr over the last two years. That gives us a rough average of 59,277 truck crossings a month.
Although, as the graph above suggests, 2024 has proven to be a considerably difficult year for Pharr. In fact, excluding July, where the bridge saw a 2.6% growth in truck crossings when compared to 2023, the last four months of the year were all below 2023 levels.
Regardless, the increased capacity of Pharr is likely to encourage more truck traffic in the region, specially by divesting traffic from neighboring entry points to the U.S. such as Laredo and Brownsville—the third and sixth busiest entry points to the U.S. respectively when considering total traffic.
The project itself is a clear sign of growing interest in Mexican manufacturing, at a time where western nations are seeking to divest from China: a process commonly referred to as nearshoring. Mexico has emerged as a natural champion in the process, gaining increased interest from foreign investors and even overpassing China as the top U.S. trade partner.
The expansion of the Pharr International Bridge is likely a symptom of this growing interest in Mexico as a nearshoring destination. Through it, the total flow of goods in the country will increase to a meaningful degree while strategically diverting traffic across the country’s northern border.
