July 1, 2026

By Mary Beth Gahan

If it feels like everyone in town is on the road at the same time as you, it’s not your imagination.

At FM 1171 and Long Prairie Road, the busiest intersection in town, 82,000 vehicles pass through daily —  more cars than there are people living in Flower Mound.

That number is likely to grow, especially as residential development booms on the west side of Flower Mound.

On a recent Thursday, 48,683 cars passed through the intersection of FM 1171 and U.S. 377. Before 2020, that number was 19,000.

The town hopes congestion won’t build up at the same pace. Flower Mound has spent years evaluating the problem and implementing automated technology. A million dollars later, they’re finding they can’t do completely without the human element.

In 2018, the town council decided that traffic flow should be a strategic goal, and a year later, considered installing an adaptive signal control system along FM 2499, one of the busiest corridors in town. The technology is designed to adjust the timing of red and green lights immediately as traffic builds up. A task that used to require a person manually counting cars or laying a strip to collect data would be possible within a day.

After some tests, Morriss Road was ultimately chosen because it was not over capacity yet. The other location “failed miserably,” said Matt Hotelling, assistant director of public works.

“We knew this was if it was going to work, it was going to work here where you have time to move things around,” Hotelling said.

The town allocated $1 million for the project and the first camera was installed at Morriss Road and Dixon Lane in early 2022. The rest of the corridor, from FM 407 to International Parkway, was brought online in 2023.

The system is supposed to analyze the number of cars at an intersection and adjust the number of seconds each green light gets — taking some time from one side to the other — as traffic patterns change. That can be prompted by dozens of parents arriving at 3 p.m. to pick up their kids or a crash that blocks a lane.

Staff found that the system was more reactive than proactive. Sometimes, by the time timing was adjusted, the congestion had eased or shifted to another location.

Still, it has increased capacity on Morriss Road by 6 percent.

“It wasn't quite as much as we wanted it to be or as advertised from the vendor, but it gave us a lot of analytics cameras that are out there now, so it's given us a lot of data that we didn't have before that we're able to use all over town to retime signals,” Hotelling said.

Before the system was installed, the town re-timed lights every three to four years. It’s much quicker now. Half of the signals were retimed last year.

While the adaptive software is only in place on Morriss Road, the town has cameras at all of its 64 signaled intersections and can pull reports on data at each as recent as one day prior. In addition to the number of cars that go through the intersection, it shows travel time throughout the day, the number of cars running the red light, and the amount of vehicles that hit a red light versus a green light.

For example, at night, it takes a driver five minutes to travel south on FM 2499 from Dixon Lane to Flower Mound Road. During the morning rush hour, it jumps to 7.5 minutes.

The annual cost for the cameras is $790 per intersection.

The success of the program is not just because of computers, but the people who interpret the data and make the necessary changes.

The town installed a video wall a couple of years ago that shows all signaled intersections in town. A systems operator sits in the room and manually adjusts timing at lights when he sees a significant backup. The change takes effect within seconds.

“His office has no windows, but he has the best view of town,” Hotelling said.

When he gets in at 6 a.m. each morning, he regularly sees the long line of cars at International Parkway and Gerault Road on the south side of town and tries to get people on the highway for their commute by increasing the amount of seconds a green light gets.

And even though the Riverwalk Drive intersection to the south is outside town limits, Grapevine has given Flower Mound access to its signal cabinet so they can make timing adjustments as they need.

“That one is so close to us, it really affects us,” Hotelling said.

The town would like to improve the room and add one more person to handle the workload. It is listed in a decision package that will likely be given to the town council at the end of this month when the proposed budget is presented.

The capital improvement plan notes a need for an additional $1.3 million to be included in the 2027-28 budget, but that is only if the town decides to expand the system, according to Melissa Demmitt, communications director for the town.