Passenger trips to U.S. drop in February at Windsor, Sarnia border crossings

Passenger vehicle traffic across the Detroit and Port Huron border crossings dropped significantly in February, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. 

Around 25,000 fewer passenger vehicles entered the United States via the Ambassador Bridge and Windsor-Detroit tunnel — a drop of 9.2 per cent over the same period in 2024 and a reversal of a trend that had seen cross-border passenger traffic increasing.

That number corresponds to the one reported last month by Windsor-Detroit Tunnel CEO Tal Czudner, who said there had been about an eight or nine per cent decrease in overall daily traffic.

"I think we're seeing a stay Canadian and buy Canadian — kind of a Canada pride mentality – all across our country," Czudner said at the time, referring to Canadians' response to American tariffs and tariff threats. 

"I think you're seeing a lot of the discretionary trips staying home."

Many Canadians have reported cancelling trips to the United States and boycotting American-made products ever since U.S. President Donald Trump began threatening tariffs and to annex Canada by economic force.

The travel agency Flight Centre Travel Group Canada told the Canadian Press that leisure bookings to American cities dropped 40 per cent in February from the same month in 2024. One in five customers cancelled their trips to the U.S. over the past three months, CP reported.

Cross-border passenger trips had been trending upward

A total of 246,000 passenger vehicles crossed the Detroit border in February, according to the U.S. data.

That's down from 271,000 during the same period last year but still above 2023 levels of 229,000.

Prior to February, cross-border passenger traffic had been higher than in previous years.

In January, 277,000 passenger vehicles crossed into the U.S. at Windsor-Detroit crossings compared with 264,000 in January of 2024.

In December, the number was 307,000 compared to 292,000 in December of 2023.

At the Port Huron border, the number of Canadian passenger vehicles entering the U.S. via the Blue Water Bridge and Algonac ferry dropped by approximately 21 per cent in February, falling from 64,700 passenger vehicles in 2024 to 50,800.

That's even lower than February of 2023, when 57,200 passenger vehicles crossed the border

Passenger traffic across the Port Huron border had been at or above previous year's levels prior to February, except in December, when it fell below December 2023 levels by about 1,200 vehicles.

The U.S data is consistent with numbers released by Statistics Canada on Monday, which found that the number of trips by Canadian residents returning from the U.S. by car declined by 23 per cent, or 1.2 million trips, nationwide over February of 2025. 

"We do see a decrease in traffic coming from the US, about a 25 per cent decrease in shoppers going to the U.S. " said Mark Webber, the national president of the Customs and Immigration Union, which represents frontline employees of the Canada Border Services Agency. 

U.S. vehicle traffic to Canada was also down in February. 

There were 676,800 U.S. resident trips to Canada by automobile last month, a drop of 7.9 per cent over February of 2024.

StatCan data comes from the Canada Border Services Agency's Integrated Primary Inspection Line system, which captured 88.9 per cent of automobile entries in 2024, according to StatCan's website.