Every year, up to 80,000 people move to North Texas. Unfortunately for all of us, they usually bring their cars. One of the biggest downsides of the boom we are seeing in Dallas-Fort Worth is the ever-worsening traffic mess. Let me tell you, it’s only going to get worse. We’ve been complaining about traffic since North Central Expressway opened in the 1950s. As the city has expanded, road and highway congestion has spread out. The new ground zero of gridlock is the intersection of Dallas North Tollway and State Highway 121 in Collin County. That’s where developers are building billions of dollars of offices, shops, apartments, restaurants and hotels. By the end of next year, when all the new offices around the tollway/121 intersection are finished, over 20,000 more people will be working in the new Legacy West development and nearby. The increase in employment there will probably approach 30,000 or more people in the next four years and when the Legacy West market gets built out, they will have more office space than downtown Fort Worth.
You have all these jobs created and people coming into town. West Plano residents and area developers are gritting their teeth and hoping for the best when all these workers start moving into buildings in West Plano and Frisco later this year and in 2018. They can hope all they want, but any way you figure, it’s going to be a mess. They are adding lanes to Dallas North Tollway. And developers and employers in the Legacy business park are planning for shuttle buses to move people among offices, restaurants and apartments. It’s a flood of people and the consequence of North Texas’ success as one of the hottest real estate markets and economies in the country And it’s not just Plano. Uptown, downtown and Richardson are getting gridlocked, too.
Our commute times average about an hour, according to a study released last week by research firm Inrix. That’s still well below the numbing 101-minute average commute time in Los Angeles or the average 71-minute drive to work in Atlanta. But it still amounts to the equivalent of almost 22 days a year that North Texans spend in their cars trying to get to work so they can turn around and go home again.
Right now there are 7 million people living here, and it’s going to 10 million.
Published on 2017-02-28 13:28:49
