The queue that eats your day is at Laredo, not Windsor

Detention is the only line on a lane that never shows up on the rate confirmation. Detention pay trucking Canada is negotiated shipper by shipper, so no survey publishes it, and that silence is where a good lane quietly stops paying. The wait itself is measurable. Start there.

What the queue looked like at 2am Monday

The board captured on 26 October put the Peace Bridge at 13 minutes, Queenston-Lewiston at 7 and the Pacific Highway crossing at 5. The rest of the tracked crossings read clear. Five of the nine had updated from the live feed at capture time, so a clear reading from an older capture is last known, not confirmed.

A snapshot tells you about the truck in front of you today. It says nothing about what to schedule around.

Every crossing on the dashboard carries a median, a 75th percentile and a 90th. The median is your ordinary day. The 90th percentile is the bad one, and it turns up often enough that you should expect it. Here is the same window, 55 observations across 55 days on the Canadian side and a shorter run on the American side, sorted by the bad day.

Crossing	Line you are joining	Median	90th percentile	Worst day
Calexico East	Into the US, CBP	15	78.5	110
Laredo World Trade Bridge	Into the US, CBP	45	60	60
Santa Teresa	Into the US, CBP	42.5	50	50
El Paso Ysleta	Into the US, CBP	35	40	45
Sweetgrass, Montana	Into the US, CBP	27.5	40	60
Otay Mesa	Into the US, CBP	20	31	50
Queenston-Lewiston	Into Canada, CBSA	7	27	33
Blue Water Bridge, US side	Into the US, CBP	5	24.1	36
Pacific Highway	Into Canada, CBSA	5	20	70
Peace Bridge, US side	Into the US, CBP	4	18.3	22
Ambassador Bridge	Into Canada, CBSA	0	18	70
Lacolle	Into Canada, CBSA	0	0	110

Read Laredo against Queenston-Lewiston. The median day at Laredo World Trade Bridge is 45 minutes. The 90th percentile at Queenston-Lewiston, the hottest bad day on the Canadian side of this list, is 27. A truck moving produce north out of Laredo loses more of its clock on an ordinary day than a truck at Queenston loses on a bad one.

Calexico East has a median of 15 and a 90th percentile of 78.5. That queue is either nothing or your afternoon, and a driver planning off the median will be wrong often enough to notice.

Lacolle has a 90th percentile of zero and a worst day of 110 minutes. A flat average hides that shape completely.

The same bridge reports two numbers

Coutts-Sweetgrass is one crossing with two booths. On the Canadian side the 90th percentile is zero and the worst day is 20 minutes. On the American side, at Sweetgrass, the median is 27.5 and the 90th percentile is 40. Both are true at once. Each government reports the line into its own country, and the two queues are staffed separately.

So the number you plan around is the direction, not the crossing name. A carrier who checks the board, sees Coutts reading clear, and books a southbound appointment has read the wrong side of the bridge.

The Niagara crossings split the same way. Into Canada the Peace Bridge carries a 90th percentile of 13. Into the US, at Buffalo-Niagara Falls, it is 18.3. Blue Water runs 10 into Canada and 24.1 into the US.

Queenston-Lewiston carries no commercial fast lane and holds the hottest 90th percentile on the Canadian side. That does not prove one caused the other, and a schedule built on a guess is not a schedule.

What a waiting hour actually charges

An hour at the dock bills three things, and only one of them shows up on an invoice.

The first is distance. A rate is priced per mile or per kilometre, and wheels that are not turning cover none of it. Toronto to Buffalo is 160 km on our distance table. Montreal to Newark is 600, and it crosses at Lacolle, where the worst day on record is 110 minutes.

The second is fuel. The tractor is running, the reefer may be running, and the one input we measure is the price. The Natural Resources Canada weekly diesel survey printed 20 October put the national average at 264.0 cents a litre across 72 locations, with Ontario at 257.7 and Quebec at 291.1. What your truck burns while it sits is not in that survey. Litres per hour comes off a week of your own fuel records.

The third is the hours window, and it is the one that catches people. Under 49 CFR 395.3 a driver may not drive after 14 consecutive hours on duty and may drive 11 of those hours in total. A break of 30 consecutive minutes is required after 8 hours of driving. The limit runs 70 hours across 8 consecutive days, with a 34-hour restart available. None of that clock pauses because the trailer is at a dock. The driving hours stay on the books while the window they have to fit inside closes around them.

That 110-minute day at Lacolle is 110 minutes of a 14-hour window with the wheels stopped. The driver still has driving hours left. The window they must sit inside is shorter by every minute of the wait.

Detention pay is meant to answer for the first cost. It usually answers for part of it, on a clock that starts after the wait already did, with free time in front of that.

What to do about it before you take the load

Get the free time in writing. Not the promise of it, the number. Who starts the clock, from which timestamp, and which document proves it when the shipper's dock system says something else.

Then own the timestamps yourself. A photo of the gate, the in-gate ticket, the guardhouse clock, the dock number. A detention claim without a timestamp is a story, and stories do not get paid.

Check the direction before you book, not the bridge. Southbound at Coutts means the Sweetgrass line, and its median is 27.5 minutes.

Price the lane with your own burn through the fuel cost calculator instead of ours. The difference between a lane that pays and one that quietly does not is usually the dock, and nobody runs a number on the dock.

What's next

We publish the distribution alongside the snapshot for a reason. A median of zero at most Canadian crossings and a single 110-minute day at Lacolle is a spread a live-reading board cannot show you. Track your own runs against it. The crossing that costs you money is on your regular lane, and it is already in the numbers.

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Sources: Canada Border Services Agency border wait times, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection port wait times, both captured 26 October 2026. Natural Resources Canada weekly diesel survey, print date 20 October 2026, 72 survey locations. 49 CFR 395.3, hours of service for property-carrying vehicles, U.S. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Distance table from the Northern Mile dashboard.

How these numbers are built: https://dashboard.northernmilemedia.com/methodology/nmdi/

Wait distributions by crossing: https://dashboard.northernmilemedia.com/border-trends/ Queenston-Lewiston detail: https://dashboard.northernmilemedia.com/border-wait-times/queenston-lewiston-bridge/ Lacolle detail: https://dashboard.northernmilemedia.com/border-wait-times/lacolle-border-crossing/ Run your own burn rate: https://dashboard.northernmilemedia.com/fuel-cost-calculator/