Texas Transit Association

Census data released Wednesday confirm what hundreds of thousands of commuters in North Texas stalled daily already know: People are not just headed to Dallas and Fort Worth anymore for work. The seven-county region’s booming outlying areas, especially Collin County, attracted an ever-expanding share of the region’s commuters in the 1990s, with more than 50 percent of suburban commuters heading to suburbs outside Dallas and Tarrant counties for jobs, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Commuters steer in other directions
Increasingly, suburbs are the destination for those driving to work

03/06/2003
By TONY HARTZEL and TIARA M. ELLIS / The Dallas Morning News

“It’s not the same as being on a four-lane highway with bumper-to-bumper traffic in all the lanes,” Ms. Haerle said of her commute to Dr Pepper/Seven-Up’s offices in Plano rather than North Dallas. But “there is bumper-to-bumper traffic in my commute now.”

• Dallas and Tarrant counties firmly remained the region’s job centers despite the suburban commuting shift. Tarrant-to-Dallas commuting grew by 30 percent in the decade, and one-fifth of all Tarrant County residents who worked commuted to Dallas County.

• More Dallas County workers traveled to jobs in Collin County (47,978) than Tarrant County (46,430).

• The number of new workers added in the 1990s in Collin County (108,204) outpaced Tarrant County (96,643) and trailed only Dallas County (190,501).

• Dallas County’s gains in the number of workers in the 1990s (95,633) mostly came from the suburbs, as the equivalent of only a quarter of the county’s new workers also lived there. By contrast, nearly two-thirds of Collin County’s new workers lived in that county.

The Census Bureau compiled the commuting data from the 2000 census long-form questionnaire, which was sent to one in six Americans in April 2000. The question asked: “At what location did [the respondent] work last week? If this person worked at more than one location, print where he or she worked most last week.”

The data, compiled at the county level, represent only a sample, meaning there is a natural margin of error. In addition, responses could not be gauged for accuracy because of the latitude the question gave the respondent. Some North Texas residents, for example, said that they worked the previous week in places like Saudi Arabia and the Virgin Islands – a scenario possible if they were on a business trip or worked while on vacation.

Even so, demographers and transportation planners say the data are important and useful.

Longer drive time

Ms. Haerle’s drive time has risen to 55 minutes, up from the 40-minute commute she had five years ago – even though her miles traveled to work has been cut in half. She blames new housing construction and development, especially in Frisco, for slowing her progress daily along U.S. Highway 380. She hopes her commute will drop again once the highway is expanded.

Sherman resident Robin Abbott, who drives one hour each way to work at a day care center in Frisco, first started commuting because of what the job paid. “Now that I have a daughter, it’s the quality of [day care] that I receive and child-care benefits. You can’t find the same quality of care in Sherman. The drive is definitely worth it,” she said.

Each morning, Ms. Abbott gets her 3-year-old daughter ready and hits the road at 6:30 a.m. She doesn’t run into any traffic on her 50-mile commute, but more cars crowd the highway in the evenings. If it weren’t for work, Ms. Abbott said, she would have few reasons to venture so far south.

“Everything I need is in Sherman, except my job,” she said.

Still booming

North Texas had one of the fastest-growing populations in the country during the 1990s, spurred largely by the booming telecom industry. Though that industry has had a spectacular meltdown that started in earnest in early 2001, planners and demographers say the region will continue to grow.

Commuting patterns like those of Ms. Abbott illustrate the mounting challenges for North Texas leaders. As suburban counties expand at faster rates, transportation planners will have to find more money to build suburban highways. But they will still face large costs to maintain aging roads in the urban core.

Currently, the region can afford to build about one-third of the projects needed to keep congestion from getting worse. Because of highway congestion, planners predict a 48 percent increase in major side street traffic by 2025.

More projects

In addition, simply getting around town will become more difficult by 2025 if more money is not found for road construction. The North Central Texas Council of Governments estimates that the annual cost of congestion, measured in motorist delays, will rise from $5.3 billion a year currently to at least $8.2 billion a year.

But the Texas Department of Transportation is targeting billions of dollars for projects like the Dallas High Five and expanding major suburban routes such as State Highway 121 and the Grapevine Funnel. The North Texas Tollway Authority also has plans to build toll roads well into northern Collin and Denton counties.

Regional leaders also have started looking more closely at ways to keep people moving that don’t involve building more roads. Ideas include asking the Legislature for new laws that ease the process for joining a mass-transit agency like Dallas Area Rapid Transit.

But the regional growth and dispersed commute patterns means there are no simple answers for agencies like DART.

“They are commuting everywhere,” said DART Executive Vice President Doug Allen. “Fortunately, we’ve built a network that allows people to go a lot of different places. But as the region wrestles with how to control traffic and congestion while encouraging growth, some transportation projects will require new funding.”

DART has 13 member cities, including Dallas. An additional 1 million residents in the four-county urban area live in a city that does not belong to a transit agency, according to supporters of an expanded mass transit network.

Housing questions

The growing city-to-suburb trend also could show the need for more affordable housing in the suburbs. As the suburban job base grows, people from the cities are finding more jobs in the outlying areas, said Rocky Gardiner, research manager for the North Central Texas Council of Governments.

“People may be living in Dallas and commuting where the jobs are,” he said. “But businesses in the suburban areas may be having trouble finding workers for more service-oriented jobs.”

Plano is becoming a satellite city that attracts its commuters from farther away, said Dr. Steve Murdock, the Texas state demographer.

As counties grow, more of their residents will naturally work in the same area. The key indicator for a suburb developing its own identity, he said, is whether its growth comes more from professional jobs.

“As counties get larger and have more people working in them, it doesn’t mean they’re all less dependent on the urban center,” he said. “They still may be as dependent on Dallas as before.”