The Best North Texas Suburbs If You Still Commute

The commute is the constraint that shapes every other part of a housing search, and it is the one most people estimate rather than measure.

In this metro that estimate is unusually likely to be wrong, for two specific and fixable reasons.

Why Straight-Line Distance Lies Here

North Texas has lakes, a tollway network with limited crossings, and a road grid interrupted in inconvenient places. The result is that map distance and drive time come apart badly.

The clearest example: Rowlett is 16.1 straight-line miles from downtown Dallas and Plano is 17.6. By road, Rowlett is 19.5 miles and about 27 minutes, while Plano is 19.0 miles and about 23. Lake Ray Hubbard is in the way, and the map does not tell you that.

That is not a rounding error. It is large enough to reverse a ranking, which is why the neighborhood matcher scores commute on real road routing and refuses to mix routed times with straight-line estimates in the same comparison. A screen scored half one way and half the other is two rankings interleaved.

The same distortion applies to everything east of the lakes, anywhere the tollway is the only sensible route, and anywhere a highway gap forces a detour. The Rockwall version of this problem.

Congestion Is Directional

This is the piece of local knowledge worth the most and it appears in no relocation packet.

In the morning the dominant flow is southbound and inbound toward Dallas and the airport corridor. In the evening it reverses. If your office is north of you, or if you are travelling outbound in the morning, you are driving against the flow in both directions.

Two practical consequences:

• A longer reverse commute frequently beats a shorter one with the flow. Living north of a Legacy corridor office can produce a faster drive than living south of it, despite the extra distance.
• Averages are useless. A route that averages 25 minutes may be 18 one way and 38 the other, and you experience both.

Nobody factors this in when choosing a city, and it is checkable in one morning. The corridor map for the Legacy employment area.

By Where You Actually Work

This metro has several employment centres rather than one, and the right answer differs completely between them.

One general rule that holds across all of them: the cities that look cheap on a listing site are cheap partly because of where they are relative to jobs. That is not a hidden flaw, it is the trade, and it is only a bad trade if you did not price it. Where the affordable suburbs are.

What Rail Changes, and Where It Exists

Rail in North Texas is not a substitute for a car for most households. What it does change is whether a household can run one car instead of two, and whether a teenager can get places without a parent driving.

Where it exists in the northern suburbs:

• Richardson, five stations across three lines including a rail connection toward the airport. The strongest transit position in the northern suburbs.
• Carrollton, three Green Line stations, the A-train, and Silver Line service to DFW Airport.
• Plano, rail service including the northern terminus of the Red Line.
• Addison, a Silver Line station with a one-seat ride to the airport.
• Garland and Rowlett, on the eastern side.

Where it does not: Frisco, Allen, Prosper, McKinney and Celina are not DART member cities and have no stations. If rail matters to your household, that fact alone eliminates a large part of the Collin County corridor, and it is worth knowing before you spend three weekends there. What rail does to home values.

How to Test a Commute Properly

1. Drive it. Twice. Once at your real morning departure time, once at your real evening one. Not on a Saturday, not at ten in the morning.
2. Do it from the specific address, not from the city centre. Within a large suburb the difference between two neighborhoods can be fifteen minutes.
3. Note the variance, not just the time. A route that is reliably 30 minutes is better than one averaging 25 with a range of 15 to 50, because you cannot plan around variance.
4. Check for a single point of failure. If one bridge, one tollway or one interchange carries your whole route, an incident there has no alternative.
5. Convert it into hours and money. Forty minutes each way is roughly seven hours a week and about twenty thousand additional miles a year. Price that against the housing saving.
6. Then score it against everything else in the neighborhood matcher, which uses real routing rather than distance.

And if you have stopped commuting entirely, the ranking changes completely and most of this post stops applying: the best North Texas suburbs if you work from home.