Originally Posted by
catocony
Take a look at Google maps, streetview. Just a couple of miles east of Blaine, you can follow the road that is the border. A house or small apartment building on the US side, a two-lane paved road, then a house on the Canadian side of the road. No fencing other than the usual property fences you would find anywhere.
All along the border, they have put up jersey barriers on a lot of the country roads that used to slice through the line. But, in many places, there are houses on both sides of the road.
Yes, I have traversed those roads a few times. It always struck me as comical how wide open it all is, and yet the border guards (both US and Canadian) at Blaine put on the act that they are keeping the border hermetically sealed. The Abbottsford crossing is much less that way, possibly because they can just look out across the fields and get the joke.