When the gleaming office campuses of Legacy West opened in 2017 and thousands of employees began their commutes to and from the northwestern corner of Plano, the city knew to expect a flood of new commuters on its road network.

City officials have said that just how much of an effect Plano’s $3 billion mixed-use development has had on traffic to date, however, remains unknown.

In the past year, the introduction of thousands of new drivers has been compounded by near-constant construction along the Dallas North Tollway—the type of construction that is known to divert commuters onto major north-south thoroughfares of Plano’s arterial road network like Preston Road.

Despite the influx of employees to Legacy West, fewer drivers used a Plano section of the adjacent tollway in 2017 than did during the previous year, according to North Texas Tollway Authority traffic counts. And although an NTTA spokesperson did not know the reason for the decline, it coincided with a massive $280 million construction project that in the last year prompted several total closures of the tollway near Legacy West.

“I do not have any speculation about fluctuations in the numbers, other than to point out that this area has been under construction for some time now and that could affect people’s decision to use the roadway,” Michael Rey, the tollway authority spokesperson, wrote in an email.

Drivers are known to seek alternative routes during construction projects, Plano Director of Engineering Caleb Thornhill said. The major north-south thoroughfares near the tollway in Plano include Preston Road to the east and Midway Road to the west.

“People—kind of like water—will find that alternate route that’s quickest for them,” whether that means using navigation software or other methods, Thornhill said.

Meanwhile, the traffic increases on the city’s arterial roadways were expected. A study commissioned by the city in 2016 projected that by 2025, employment in the Legacy business area would increase by 60 percent. The city’s road network, the study said, would someday be inadequate to meet the travel demand of the booming area without a series of infrastructure investments and other measures, including a concerted effort by area employers to reduce the number of single-occupancy vehicles on the road.

The solutions, however, will take time and a substantial amount of buy-in from area businesses, said Lloyd Neal, the city’s transportation engineering manager.

“We’re not able to build our way out of it,” Neal said. “This is really a solution of road users and the employers in the area. They’ll have to do innovative things like offset work times, telecommuting, carpooling, vanpooling—anything to get people out of that single-car mentality.”

Although the city has ideas for how to reduce car traffic, employers would need to coordinate with each other to enact them. Plano Director of Special Projects Peter Braster said the city has tried to facilitate that process by incorporating a transportation management association and applying for a funding grant to finance the first two years of its work.

City officials hope major Legacy West employers, such as Toyota and Liberty Mutual, will join the association and adopt various programs and incentives to stagger or reduce rush-hour traffic counts, Braster said.

In the meantime, more employees continue to pour into their existing office buildings at Legacy West, and thousands more are expected to join them in the near future. The development is growing so quickly that the city engineering department has held off on taking annual traffic counts in the area for now, Neal said.

“We’re hoping, once the major employers have stabilized with their activity, then we’ll go back in six months after that and actually do the traffic counts for all the [city] studies,” Neal said.

This story is one update from The January Issue. View the full list of Top 7 stories to follow in 2018 here.