This Foot Bridge Lets You Walk From California Straight Into a Mexican Airport

At the southern edge of San Diego, there is a building where travelers can park their cars in California, carry their luggage inside, walk down a hallway, cross an international border on foot, and emerge directly inside an airport in Mexico. The entire international crossing happens on a 390-foot enclosed pedestrian bridge. It is called Cross Border Xpress, better known as CBX, and it connects the Otay Mesa area of San Diego directly with Tijuana International Airport. Instead of driving through one of the region's notoriously busy border crossings and then making your way across Tijuana to the airport, CBX essentially turns Tijuana's airport into an airport that can be accessed from the United States. There is one major catch: it is not a normal pedestrian border crossing. You cannot simply buy a CBX ticket and use the bridge to visit Tijuana. Southbound travelers must have a boarding pass for a flight departing Tijuana International Airport, along with the required travel documents and a separate CBX ticket. CBX says passengers traveling from the United States into Mexico may use the bridge within 24 hours of their scheduled departure. That restriction is what makes the facility so unusual. CBX is effectively an international border crossing built specifically for airline passengers. On the American side, travelers arrive at a dedicated terminal at 2745 Otay Pacific Drive. The property includes parking, passenger services, ticketing facilities and transportation connections. After documents are checked, passengers enter the enclosed bridge and walk approximately 390 feet across the border. At the other end, they are inside the Tijuana airport complex. The physical walk is short, but the idea behind it took decades to become reality. San Diego has long faced a difficult airport problem. San Diego International Airport sits close to downtown and is hemmed in by developed neighborhoods, highways, San Diego Bay and other infrastructure. It has only one commercial runway, making large-scale expansion much more complicated than at airports built on enormous tracts of land outside their cities. Tijuana International Airport presented an intriguing alternative because its runway sits almost directly against the international border. For decades, planners on both sides discussed ways to make the airport useful to travelers in Southern California. Ideas for some form of binational airport date back even earlier, but the issue became particularly significant around 1990 when the San Diego Association of Governments was looking for long-term solutions to the region's aviation needs. One proposal envisioned something far more ambitious than a pedestrian bridge, essentially creating a binational airport complex spanning the border. That idea quickly ran into political, physical and economic complications. Mexico did not want proposals that would significantly alter the existing Tijuana airport, while San Diego officials were searching for something capable of solving the region's broader airport capacity problem. A simpler idea eventually proved more practical: leave the airport in Mexico and build a passenger terminal in California connected to it by a secure bridge. The result finally opened on December 9, 2015. The CBX bridge is about 120 meters, or 390 feet, long. Despite crossing one of the world's most heavily traveled international boundaries, a typical CBX crossing can be surprisingly quick. The company currently lists an average crossing time of roughly 15 to 20 minutes, although immigration processing and busy travel periods can make individual experiences longer. That can still be dramatically different from entering Mexico by car and later returning through a traditional land port of entry, where traffic congestion can create waits measured in hours rather than minutes. The system is especially useful for people living in the San Diego region who are traveling to Mexico. Tijuana International Airport has an extensive domestic network serving cities throughout the country. Current CBX information advertises access to more than 35 destinations, with routes to major cities and vacation destinations such as Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Cancún, León, Culiacán and many others. Depending on the destination and travel dates, fares from Tijuana can also be substantially lower than comparable itineraries beginning at San Diego International Airport. CBX itself advertises potential savings compared with flying from other Southern California airports, although the actual difference varies by flight and season. The experience creates an unusual situation for a San Diego traveler. Someone can leave a car in the United States, walk across the border without ever stepping onto a public street in Mexico, pass through Mexican immigration and then board a domestic Mexican flight from Tijuana. The traveler effectively uses a Mexican airport while beginning the airport journey in California. Tijuana has also developed another aviation advantage that San Diego does not currently have: nonstop service to China. As of October 2026, published schedules list nonstop Tijuana departures to Beijing on Hainan Airlines and Shenzhen on China Southern Airlines. That means travelers in the San Diego-Tijuana region can potentially access trans-Pacific service through an airport reached by walking across the CBX bridge rather than driving roughly 120 miles north to Los Angeles International Airport. The way those China flights operate makes the story even stranger. The eastbound flights toward China are connected to services originating in Mexico City. Mexico City's airport sits more than 7,000 feet above sea level. At high elevations, thinner air reduces aircraft performance, particularly during takeoff. For an extremely long flight across the Pacific, carrying enough fuel while also carrying passengers and baggage can create performance limitations. Tijuana is almost at sea level. That makes it useful as an intermediate stop before the long Pacific crossing. Aircraft can arrive from Mexico City, stop in Tijuana, then depart for Asia under much more favorable takeoff conditions. Hainan's current Beijing service includes a Mexico City to Tijuana segment before continuing from Tijuana to Beijing. China Southern similarly operates Mexico City to Tijuana before continuing toward Shenzhen. The exact operation of these routes has changed over time. In earlier versions of China Southern's service, the Tijuana stop functioned primarily as a technical refueling stop and local passengers were not permitted to board. By 2026, published schedules list Tijuana to Shenzhen as a passenger route, alongside Hainan's Tijuana to Beijing service. It gives CBX an international role that goes beyond simply helping Californians take inexpensive domestic flights around Mexico. The facility itself has also grown considerably since opening. CBX says nearly 30 million passengers had used the crossing during its first decade. The terminal operates 24 hours a day, and newer processing technology has been introduced to speed up northbound travel into the United States. For passengers returning from Mexico, the process works in reverse. After landing at Tijuana, eligible travelers follow signs to CBX rather than leaving the airport normally. They enter the bridge from the Mexican side, walk north across the international boundary and clear U.S. Customs and Border Protection before exiting into San Diego. Within minutes, someone can go from baggage claim at a Mexican airport to a parking lot in California. It is difficult to find another airport arrangement quite like it. The United States and Mexico never built the enormous shared binational airport that planners once imagined. Instead, they ended up with something much simpler: an airport on one side of the border, a terminal on the other, and a hallway connecting them. The distance between those two countries at CBX is only about 390 feet. For millions of travelers, that short walk has effectively made Tijuana International Airport part of Southern California's aviation system without moving a single runway across the border.