Transportation

Collin County will top out at more than three million people. We have about 1.3 million today. Everyone in that future county has to get somewhere every morning, and the roads that will carry them have to be planned now — because the land they’ll sit on is being sold and built on right now.

This is my central concern about how we’re approaching it. The county adopted an updated Thoroughfare Plan in December 2025, built around a projection of roughly two million residents by 2050. But the county’s own Outer Loop planning acknowledges that ultimate buildout exceeds three million. We are laying out a road network against a number we already know is not the finish line. The plan gets revisited every five to ten years, and when it does, it should be measured against full buildout rather than a convenient horizon.

Meanwhile the strain is already here. Highway 380 is a mess, and growth will make congestion worse throughout Plano, Frisco, and Allen. The answer is capacity that doesn’t yet exist: real East-West alternatives to 380, and North-South alternatives to the Tollway, Preston, and US 75.

The single most valuable thing the county can do is acquire and reserve right-of-way well in advance. Land is never cheaper than it is today, and a corridor preserved now costs a fraction of one condemned through developed property in 2045. That work is unglamorous, it produces no ribbon-cuttings, and it is the difference between a county that moves and one that doesn’t.

I’ve led the fight to reform DART for six years, and I’ll keep at it. Billions of taxpayer dollars are sunk into transit systems that no longer effectively serve the people they were built to serve, and residents deserve either performance or accountability for the absence of it. Collin County also needs transit solutions of its own — designed for how people actually live and travel here, rather than inherited from a model built for a different region in a different era.

I’ll do this work the way it has to be done: proactively, and with everyone at the table. That means TxDOT, state and federal officials and agencies, our municipalities, neighboring counties, the North Central Texas Council of Governments, and the Regional Transportation Council.