It took Navy Police, a bullhorn, and about three hours to untangle traffic near the NASNI main gate one recent Saturday. It’s the kind of backup that’s become routine enough that resident Jami Teagle-Burgos now backs her car into her driveway to ensure she’s able to leave it.
Teagle-Burgos, who lives with her husband in the restored Glenn Curtiss house near the main gate at Naval Air Station North Island (NASNI), told the Coronado City Council that traffic routinely backs up for blocks down Third Street and Alameda Boulevard — not just at morning rush, but also at random hours throughout the day.
She said the backups have made it dangerous for her kids to cross the street, kept trash trucks from reaching her block, and trapped ride share drivers and idling buses in gridlock.
It’s a problem the U.S. Navy is working to solve with its biometric expedited-entry lane program at NASNI, known as the Southwest Inbound Fast Traffic (SWIFT) lanes program. It uses facial recognition matched against the Defense Biometric Identification System (DBIDS) to raise the base gate arm automatically for people enrolled, without them having to stop.
Those using SWIFT lanes are told to drive about five miles per hour and not to tailgate. It’s nearly twice as fast as the old system, in which entering vehicles must stop to have their IDs scanned by a gate guard.
The program covers anyone with a base ID: active duty service members, veterans, and dependents. It launched in pilot form in December 2025 with a single, dedicated lane and has since expanded.
Captain Lauren Jacoby, the base’s commanding officer, briefed the council during a Sept. 15 meeting on the program’s performance, its limitations, and the traffic complaints that have followed its rollout.
Jacoby said the SWIFT program wasn’t developed through years of formal Pentagon funding and testing, the way major Navy programs usually are. Instead, it started as a low-cost pilot backed by the Defense Innovation Unit and later NavalX, two Pentagon offices that fund experimental technology to get it into use fast, on the theory that a program stuck in the typical, years-long approval process is more likely to get cut before it ever produces results.
The biometric lanes process about 600 cars per hour, which is about twice the rate of legacy ID-scan lanes, which handles about 325. Four of the main gate’s five lanes are currently dedicated to SWIFT.
The system has also cut staffing needs at the gate. Jacoby said that one year ago, the Navy posted 15 sailors at the main gate to three: one checking IDs at the legacy lane, and one covering each pair of SWIFT lanes.
Still, as Teagle-Burgos attested during public comment, the backups persist.
Jacoby attributed much of the congestion to slow enrollment and late merging, saying drivers who wait until the last moment to merge into the single legacy lane have created a bottleneck, particularly since the base cut ID-check capacity down to one lane.
However, Jacoby said he has seen enrollment in SWIFT increase as drivers see the legacy lane back up while biometric lanes move quickly. He also noted that some unenrolled drivers have started using the base’s other gates, which do not have SWIFT lanes, instead.
Implementation has not been without hiccups. SWIFT depends on the DBIDS database to operate, and the system has gone offline more than once, causing delays. The system currently excludes vehicle escorts and motorcycle riders, although the base is trying to change this.
Teagle-Burgos offered a fix of her own, credited to her husband, an engineer: move the legacy, non-Swift lane from the far-left position to lane four or five. Drivers heading into Coronado tend to turn left, she said, so backups in the leftmost lane block traffic trying to turn left onto Alameda Boulevard from the bridge. She suggested that the bottleneck would ease if the slower lane were moved to the right side of the gate instead.
Ride share and taxi drivers, as well as caregivers and other non-military personnel with base access, who don’t carry standard military IDs can still enroll, Jacoby said, so long as they have been issued a DBIDS card.
Councilmember Carrie Downey asked whether rideshare and taxi drivers who don’t carry standard military ID cards can still enroll. Jacoby said yes — anyone issued a DBIDS card, including caregivers and other non-military personnel with base access, qualifies for the program.
Jacoby said about 25,000 people have enrolled in the last year, compared with roughly 24,000 vehicles that pass through the gate on a typical day. However, the Navy has no way to reconcile enrollment records against personnel who have since transferred.
Jacoby said the system has proven more than 90 percent reliable.
Carolyn Reynolds of Coronado Cab and Coronado Livery told the council her drivers have embraced the program and asked to schedule a group enrollment day for her staff.
