TIJUANA — It's 2 in the morning, and the lines of cars waiting to cross the border have already grown so long that they are snarling the streets of this city's downtown nearly half a mile away.
The cars keep coming, clogging ramps and overpasses, snaking around tamale vendors, traffic-circle monuments and the plaza outside City Hall.
But most of the lines at the border crossing aren't moving. Car engines are turned off. Motorists are literally asleep at the wheel. Some rest their heads on their steering wheels, others against the glass of the car windows. A chorus of snorts and whistles drifts out the open windows of a Volkswagen Jetta in which four men snooze. In a Toyota Corolla, a man has tied a towel around his eyes to block out light.
The slumberers don't have to be in San Diego until the workday begins hours from now. But night after night, they queue up in the area leading to the border inspection lanes -- with pillows and blankets as well as packed lunches -- because of a twisted sort of logic.
If they show up at 4 a.m., when 20 of the lanes leading to the San Ysidro Port of Entry open for the day, they could find themselves in stop-and-go traffic for up to two hours. Four other lanes are always open, but if the crossers try to get through those lanes at this hour, they'll have to stay awake in line for at least half an hour -- and then find somewhere to sleep in San Diego before work starts.
This way, they can count on crossing the border reasonably quickly after sleeping fairly safely -- if far from comfortably.
"That's why we get old here in line," said Librado Garcia, who paints mansions in Rancho Santa Fe. "We don't sleep well."
This snoozer of a commute is one of the unwelcome byproducts of a booming metropolitan area sliced by an international border. Most high-paying jobs in the border region are in the San Diego area, but an ever-increasing number of workers comes from Tijuana. Most of the overnight commuters -- the sleepers number in the hundreds and possibly thousands -- are either U.S. citizens or Mexican nationals who are legal U.S. residents. Many have moved to Tijuana after being forced out of San Diego's pricy housing market.
Federal authorities and regional planners have long wrestled with how to balance national security concerns with the needs of a regional economy in which all sorts of people (construction crews, delivery truck drivers, stock clerks, painters, students, shoppers) cross back and forth each day.
