Access to Destinations in Dallas–Fort Worth

How this map works

What this is

This map is a computer model of the real Dallas–Fort Worth transportation network. It scores the trip from every neighborhood in the region to a handful of destinations: AT&T Stadium on a match day, and downtown Dallas, downtown Fort Worth, downtown Arlington, and DFW Airport on an ordinary weekday. It's a model — not a survey, not a traffic count, and not an official plan. It was built by Ives Street, an independent transportation-modeling firm, for [eyeblack].

The core idea: a trip's whole cost, in minutes

Most transportation maps answer a question like "how far can you get in thirty minutes?" This map asks a different question: what does the trip actually cost you, all-in?

A trip costs you two things: your time and your money. We combine them into a single currency — minutes.

Time is counted door-to-door. Not just the minutes in the vehicle, but walking to the stop, waiting for the bus, making the transfer, hunting for parking, and walking in from the far end of the lot. A "twenty-minute drive" that involves ten minutes of parking is a thirty-minute trip.

Money — gas, parking, fares, ridehail — gets converted into minutes based on what an hour is worth to the traveler. Research on how people actually trade money against time finds that, on average, people value an hour of travel time at about half their hourly wage, and that's the rate we use. We estimate each income group's hourly wage from its Census income band (annual income divided by 2,080 working hours a year). This is especially important for airports and stadiums, and other places where parking is expensive. $20 in event parking costs a worker earning $15 an hour the equivalent of more than two and a half hours. It costs a corporate lawyer the equivalent of about twenty minutes.

Once every option is priced in minutes, the map colors each neighborhood by its most convenient way to get there — the mode with the lowest all-in cost for that traveler, from that neighborhood. Tap any neighborhood and you'll see the full menu: every mode's time, dollars, and emissions.

Different people, different maps

This isn't one map. It's redrawn for each kind of traveler.

Travelers differ by income, which changes two things at once: how much a fare or a parking fee hurts, and the exchange rate between their money and their time. And they differ by whether they own a car — which changes everything. That's the honest headline this tool keeps teaching: the map barely moves for people with cars, and transforms for people without them.

One refinement for commute-like trips: many workers park free at work. For trips to the downtowns, we discount parking costs by the share of jobs where the employer picks up the tab — a share that rises with income, since office jobs bundle free parking more often than service and retail jobs do.

The race and ethnicity lens deserves a careful explanation, because it does not change how anyone is modeled to travel. What it changes is who is counted. Within each neighborhood, we know from the Census how race and ethnicity intersect with income and car ownership — actually intersect, not assumed to be independent. When you select a group, the map re-weights to show the network as experienced by where that group's members actually live, with the incomes and car access they actually have. Group definitions follow the Census: the race groups are non-Hispanic, and "Hispanic or Latino" includes people of any race.

How the trips are computed

The game-day traffic is real. We captured live traffic conditions across the entire region — using Mapbox, the same real-time data that powers navigation apps — during an actual World Cup match at AT&T Stadium on June 17, 2026, and again at 8 a.m. the next morning for the ordinary-weekday comparison. When the map says a game-day drive from Plano takes an hour, that's not a guess about what a big event might do to the roads. It's what the roads were actually doing.

The rest of the ingredients:

• Streets, sidewalks, and bike routes come from OpenStreetMap, the collaborative map of the world that underlies most modern routing tools.
• Transit routes and schedules come from the region's transit agencies, in the same published format (GTFS) their own trip planners use.
• People — population, incomes, car ownership, race and ethnicity — come from the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey.

We divide the region into about 900 neighborhood-scale zones — small hexagons where people are dense, larger ones where they're sparse. Then, for every zone, for every destination, for every kind of traveler, we compute the actual best door-to-door route by every mode: driving, transit, walking, bicycling, and ridehail. Not straight-line estimates — routed trips over the real network, millions of them, timed to the day and hour each destination represents (match-day conditions for the stadium, a weekday for the downtowns and the airport).

Two final details: First, we don't count walks longer than 45 minutes — as a whole trip or as the walk to a transit stop. If a neighborhood shows no transit option, that usually means every stop is more than a 45-minute walk away, which is its own finding about the network. Second, the emissions figures on the trip card are estimates, computed from the trip's distance and a typical per-mile emission rate for each mode — driving highest, transit much lower per passenger, walking and biking zero. They're there for fair comparison between modes, not as a precise carbon accounting.

The what-if projects

Arlington is the largest city in America with no public transit. The scenario menus let you build some, three levers at a time, in any combination:

• Arlington bus — a local bus network, adapted from a network proposed by Arlington's Transportation Advisory Committee in 2017. You can run it in mixed traffic, or upgraded to bus rapid transit: dedicated lanes, faster and more reliable.
• Regional rail — a new line connecting the stadium area to downtown Dallas. One version follows the Union Pacific freight corridor that already runs through downtown Arlington — our own what-if: what would it mean to run passenger trains on tracks that are already there? The other follows I-30 as part of a high-speed-rail alignment that is currently in planning.
• Frequency — every existing bus and train in the region, running one and a half times as often. No new lines; just more of what exists.

When you pick a scenario, we rebuild the transportation network with the project in it and recompute every trip from scratch — every zone, every traveler, every mode. The map then shows change versus today: green where the trip gets more convenient, red where it gets worse. Tap a neighborhood for the before-and-after, mode by mode.

When we summarize what a scenario is worth, we look across the whole distribution of travelers — not just the average. A project that saves ten minutes for a handful of neighborhoods and nothing for everyone else looks very different, in our summaries, from one that saves two minutes for a million people.

Reading it right — and what it leaves out

A few guardrails for honest use:

• The scores describe a typical traveler of each kind, not a prediction of any one person's trip.
• This tool is at its strongest in comparison — between neighborhoods, between kinds of travelers, between scenarios.
• A neighborhood's color is its most convenient option, not what everyone there actually does. Plenty of people drive from neighborhoods where transit scores well, and vice versa.

The model doesn't capture a few important factors: crowding — on trains, and on roads beyond what the game-day traffic capture reflects; the last half-mile of a stadium trip, inside the parking lot, where everyone becomes a pedestrian; and the safety and comfort of a route, as opposed to its speed. On ridehail prices: we did check surge pricing during the World Cup match, and found less of it than we expected — but our ridehail costs are still estimates, not quotes.

It's a model. It's a careful one, built on real traffic, real schedules, and real demographics — but real conditions on a Cowboys Sunday will vary.

Who made this

Ives Street is an independent transportation-modeling firm. We build tools that measure access — to all destinations, by all modes, for all people. We help people understand their cities, and we help cities make better planning decisions.

This map was produced for [eyeblack].