Fewer Foreign Passengers Are Flying to the US

My favorite part about getting older is that sometimes I wake up at 3:30 AM for no reason and can’t fall back asleep. This happened this weekend and by 5:30 or so I had exhausted my usual phone games (Wordle, Quordle, Blossom, Immaculate, Strands, etc). Reading my book about the extinction of the dinosaurs and rewatching the 9th inning of a thrilling Texas baseball win only woke me up more. Then I saw an article from Axios about how travel to the US from other countries fell off a cliff in March. As a true nerd, what excited me about the article was that they linked to an official government data source that I wasn’t familiar with. I went to the CBP’s Average Wait Time website and found a rich dataset that can be extremely useful for describing current trends. The system is kind of clunky in that you have to select individual agencies and terminals, and the online data appears to only go back for 3 years despite the data collection starting in 2008. But the data was easily exportabl ... Read full article.