San Diego, California - San Diego has a problem. Its airport has only one runway and, being boxed in by neighborhoods and the ocean, there isn’t much room for expansion.

There has been a number of solutions suggested over the years, each more costly or impractical than the last. There have been proposals to convert a nearby military air station, to connect a new airport 70 miles away by high-speed rail, and even to expand the San Diego's Lindbergh Field airport by building floating runways over the Pacific ocean.

Tijuana’s Abelardo L. Rodriguez International Airport

But travelers have figured out their own ways to overcome high costs and congestion, often relying on nearby airports. For example, every year 2.4 million people from the United States side of the border cross into Mexico to use Tijuana’s Abelardo L. Rodriguez International Airport.

With airfares usually less expensive in Mexico than in the US, driving the extra miles makes increasingly more sense all the time. Recently, California resident Gilberto Rodriguez estimated that he saved $1,000 on a recent trip for his family of four by flying out of Tijuana - never mind the hours spent waiting to cross the border.

But travelers using Abelardo L. Rodriguez International as their main airport can expect their travels to get a lot easier in the very near future. A joint venture between Chicago’s Equity Group Investments and Grupo Aeropuertario del Pacífico, a public-private consortium that operates 12 airports in Mexico - including Tijuana's, is working on creating a new kind of border crossing.

If everything goes according to plan, sometime in 2015 US residents will be able to park on the American side of the border, go through customs, then walk across a 325-foot-long covered walkway directly into the Tijuana airport.

San Diego's Lindbergh Field

A big part of the bridge’s appeal is that it will ease traffic from nearby San Ysidro and Otay Mesa crossings, where an estimated 75,000 people cross the border each day. The bridge will work exactly the same way as any other border crossing point, except that people will be required to have an airline ticket

The project – which is expected to cost a total of $90 million, $75 of that on the US side of the border whose costs include structures for processing, administrative offices, and parking – broke ground on the Mexican side in July 2013.

Project officials on the American side have been negotiating for months with US Customs and Border Protection, which will operate the checkpoint and be paid by the bridge operators, and developers expect to receive building permits from the City of San Diego very soon.

The fee to use the bridge is expected to be between $13 to $17, though the final fees have not been set, and there would also be parking fees. There is also the potential for other development — like hotels, retail shops and convenience stores — on the US side.