We recently reported on the good transportation thinking happening in the Dallas suburb of Plano. And now this month, the city is launching a transportation management association which will work with businesses in the Legacy West development on transportation issues. “Almost 80 percent of the work is educating all of the workers in an area” about transportation options, says Peter Braster, the city’s special projects director. “And if we know we need a specific bus route because of where all the workers are coming to, we can advocate for that.”
An estimated 6,000 to 8,000 people are expected to move the Plano area over the next ten years—most of whom will likely drive their own cars to work, school, and everything in between.
Nationally, greenhouse gas emissions from transportation account for nearly the same proportion of emissions released from generating electricity (27 percent and 29 percent, respectively). The EPA estimates that passenger vehicles, pickup trucks, SUVs, and minivans are responsible for over half of all transportation-related emissions.
“There’s a real traditional suburban core that’s gridded into one-mile square boulevards, six lanes on every side of the square” says Peter Braster, the city’s special projects director. “Getting around Plano is pretty easy as far as roadways, but we don’t have all these other options that are readily available or easy to find.” Since 2015, Braster has been working to reduce traffic and congestion in the city, and part of the solution is getting drivers to choose alternatives.
A February 2016 mobility and traffic study by the city of Plano surveyed employees of the Legacy West developments, and found that 100 percent of the respondents currently drove to work, but nearly a fifth of respondents said they would use public transit to commute to the area if a convenient route was available. To that end, the Dallas Area Rapid Transit system recently launched two express bus lines that serve the Legacy West businesses. Ridership has been lower than initially estimated, according to a DART spokesperson, but as more businesses open in the Legacy area, ridership could increase.
For public transit to work effectively, “You need to have high density,” says Chandra Bhat, the director of UT Austin’s Center for Transportation Research. “High density gives you closer access to transit. It also allows it to be efficient, so you can have fewer stops and the travel time decreases,” he says. “So in some suburbs, which typically do not have high density, public transit starts at a disadvantage.”
Bhat says the shift towards encouraging alternative methods of transportation, instead of simply expanding existing roads or highways, is gaining traction in the fields of urban planning and transportation planning.
“We cannot build our way out of traffic congestion, like we have done in Texas for so long,” he says. Increasing transit, ride share and biking can benefit public health at large can benefit public health, he says, since air quality improves as fewer cars on the road burn fossil fuels—and transit can lead to better physical health as people walk or bike, even for short distances.
“We all think of the suburbs as car-dependent,” Braster says. “But the thing is, we know there’s a lot of push not to drive anymore,” says Braster. “Once people start to try and it’s easy to achieve, people will do it.”