Recently, while gazing at a map of the United States, I began to ponder which two adjacent states get the least cross-border traffic.
For example, Missouri and Kentucky share a Mississippi River border, but there don’t appear to be any bridges over it. I’m not sure whether there is any scheduled ferry service. Either way, there must be very few people who go directly from Missouri to Kentucky, or vice versa. (Has anyone on this Board ever done it?)
Likewise, there do not appear to be any paved roads traversing the Montana-South Dakota border. Again, it must get very little traffic.
Then I started thinking about national borders. How many people go from Afghanistan to China, or Panama to Colombia?
So how about it, Dopers? What’s the least-traversed border that you’ve ever crossed? (Either by vehicle, foot, or boat.) Do you have any other nominees for least-crossed in the US or elsewhere?
The border between Belgium and the Netherlands at Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau is quite intricate, with enclaves of the Netherlands inside enclaves of Belgium all inside the Netherlands, within the area of a relatively small town. You can cross a border a dozen times going from dinner to a bar all within a few minutes.
This is pretty much the exact opposite of what you asked for, I admit, but it’s still unusual nonetheless.
Another opposite of what you ask would be St Martin. The island is half French (20 sq miles) and half Dutch (14 sq miles), so you cross borders repeatedly as you drive from place to place. Each border crossing has flags, plaques, etc.
I always whistle the French National anthem each time we cross.
I’ve crossed the footbridge from Arlington, Virginia to Theodore Roosevelt Island, which is legally part of Washington, DC (and thus not “in” any particular state), but it is not accessible from the rest of DC except by boat. It’s not quite an exclave because the entire Potomac river there is part of DC, but it’s an exclave in terms of travel.
What kind of immigration restrictions are there? I assume there are no checkpoints. Can you move or work anywhere you want on the island? Do both sides have to approve visas or can one enter on whichever side is more favorable to your passport and slip over the border?
The borders have no checkpoints. The main airport is in Sint Maarten (Dutch side) (Princess Juliana International Airport). There is also a tiny airport in Saint Martin at Grande Case (French side) (L’Espérance Airport).
People are free to travel anywhere, but there are more tall slim blond people on the Dutch side. I’ve never had to deal with a visa, but that’s an interesting question.
There’s a couple of small pieces of Kentucky on the west side of the river. (The border runs along the original course of the Mississippi but in a couple of locations the river has changed course.) So it is possible to walk from Kentucky to Missouri.
Rt 225 between VT & Canada. Within 10 miles there are two interstate crossings & Rouses Point (NY). I was on a bike & didn’t see any other cars on my approach except for one Border Patrol vehicle. There was no one in the booth when I pulled up, I had to knock on the window a few times to get them to come out from the back room in early afternoon on a sunny summer day.
A railroad bridge over the Delaware between PA & NJ; no trains around.
I have walked along the US/Canadian border in MN. You could walk into Canada and back out with no problems.
There were signs (this was pre-9/11) but there were no border guards or fences. Now I understand that they have ground sensors and that there are drone flights in the area looking for illegal border crossers.
While New York and Rhode Island do not share a land border, they’re only two miles apart at their closest point. I wonder how many people have traveled across this stretch of water.
Re: MO/KY ferry service: There’s one between Dorena, MO and Hickman, KY.
My personal least-crowded border crossing is nearby – from Tennessee into Kentucky Bend. Kentucky Bend is an 18-square-mile part of Kentucky that’s bordered by Tennessee on the south and the Mississippi River (and, consequently, Missouri) on the west, north, and east.
Least traveled? I don’t know for sure. Back around 2000/2001 we hired a car to take us from Khiva, Uzbekistan to Bukhara, and, at some point (I’m not entirely sure where), there was a brief foray into Turkmenistan. The checkpoint, as I remember it, was literally just a shack with a couple of soldiers/border guards in a desert expanse.
Other than that, in the mid-90s, I volunteered in post-war ex-Yugoslavia, and there were a good number of cities I visited (and even the one I lived in) that had either unofficial or semi-official internal borders, where one side was one ethnicity, the other side another, and you couldn’t really go easily from one to the other unless you were international. As far as actually policed borders go, the one going from Croatia to Republika Srpska and back out into Bosnia (ETA: by that I mean the Federation of Bosnia and Hercegovina) might qualify for the OP.
Ditto Minnesota and Michigan only share a water border in Lake Superior. That might not be crossed too often though I think there still is quite a lot of shipping out of Duluth.
There’s a crossing between France and Switzerland at Chatelard that is just a little road and a small shed for the Swiss border agents. My then-girlfriend and I drove up one day, intending to visit the spectacular Emosson dam a couple thousand meters straight up from the village. We were the only vehicle crossing at the time.
“What is your business in Switzerland?” the border guard asked.
“We’re here to visit the lake”, I said in my best French.
“What lake?”, snarled the guard.
“Er, the one with the dam that I can see over your shoulder”, sez I.
He let us cross.
I’ve been on the bridge between Zimbabwe and Zambia at Victoria Falls, but I’m not sure that qualifies as obscure. I do recall that one has to have one’s passport stamped just to go out on the bridge, as the official border is the southern bank of the river.
In the US, the most obscure that comes to mind is the US 34 bridge over the Missouri river connecting Iowa and Nebraska. IIRC it’s out in the middle of open country, with no towns nearby. It’s a toll bridge, with tolls collected on the Nebraska side. When I was there (mid '80s) I recall a sign listing different tariffs for various vehicle types, down to bicycles and pedestrians. Walking across cost a nickel.
Took an overnight budget bus ride from South Africa into Mozambique. As we approached the border, the bus stops and we had to get out and walk across the border (about a half mile) down a dirt road surrounded by razor wire in the middle of the night as our bus disappeared with all my stuff. Once in the border office in Mozambique a guy I met on the bus showed me how to slip a $20 into my US passport that got us into the line with no one in it (it said it was officials only - there were no official people crossing that border at 2am). It got us through quicker than the empty bus - which showed up 30 mins later. Took some others on the bus another 45 mins to get through customs.
Long ago I drove Mule Creek Road (State Highway 78) from Arizona into New Mexico. It had spectacular views, but the road was scary with steep drop-offs and several hairpin curves. I was driving alone, and never saw another soul the entire stretch (about 30 miles).
That kind of reminds me. My personal “most unusual” crossing was also while I was volunteering in ex-Yugo. So, me and a couple volunteers decided to take a week off and head up to Poland. It was me (Polish-American), a Polish woman, and a New Zealander. We went Croatia-Hungary-Slovakia-brief foray into Czech Republic-Poland, via train. To keep it as cheap as possible, a lot of the crossings were done by foot. The New Zealander had to buy visas pretty much everywhere, as there weren’t reciprocal agreements with New Zealand, and we were not exactly brimming with cash at the time. So, I got in free to Hungary, the Polish woman got in free, the New Zealander, he had to pay for a transit visa. Fine.
So we get to Czech Republic. Passport control comes on the train. Me & the woman pass fine, the Kiwi has an expired Czech visa, but the control lets him pass. He’s relieved, because he’s saved himself $70 or so (which was a lot to us at the time). I’m worried about what happens when we try to cross into Poland.
Once again, me and the Polish woman cross fine. The Kiwi gets held up. The passport control person tries to be nice and diplomatic in her choppy English, but I eventually translate and say “basically, what she’s saying is that you’re in the country illegally” and says we have to go all the way to Prague to sort things out at the embassy–which is like six or seven hours out of the way for us–to get through. One guy catches wind of the conversation, and basically says, fuck 'em, let 'em go back to Prague to work it out, while another says, hey, call the border a couple kilometers down. So we got the name of “a guy” at this border, which was only for vehicles, not pedestrians, and cabbed it down there.
We get there, and there’s this huge line of semi-trucks lined up to cross. Somehow, we end up walking to the very end of this long line of trucks, only to realize the line wrapped around to not far from where we started. So we make the long trip back. Eventually, we find the administrative building. We walk in and ask for our guy. We get shuffled into an office, the official looks over our passport, he hands it back to us, tells the Kiwi “you never came back through the Czech Republic” and we were shuffled out. The border guards had to find us a ride (as this was not a pedestrian crossing), so he went to the first car and said, “looks like you have room, take these three across the border into Bielsko-Biała.” And that was that. A little awkward conversation with the driver, but he took us across, dropped us off, and we were off to finding our next train into Krakow.