Plano, Texas map

Plano occupies the southwest corner of Collin County, directly north of the Dallas County line. Downtown Dallas is 20 miles south down US-75. Richardson adjoins Plano on the south, Frisco on the west and northwest, Allen and McKinney on the north, and Murphy and Wylie on the east. Carrollton is across the Denton County line to the west.

The settlement took the name Plano in 1851, when the post office opened, and incorporated in 1873 after the Houston and Texas Central Railway came through. It stayed a farm town of a few thousand people until the 1970s; the population passed 100,000 in the 1980s and has nearly tripled since. That timing explains the street pattern — a mile grid of arterials with almost no diagonals, and residential blocks that back onto sound walls instead of fronting the main roads.

West Plano's Legacy business park grew from the campus that Electronic Data Systems built on open prairie in the 1980s. It now runs along the Dallas North Tollway between SH-121 and Spring Creek Parkway, with the Shops at Legacy and the newer Legacy West mixed-use district at Legacy Drive. Companies with head offices or major North American offices in the corridor include Toyota Motor North America, Liberty Mutual, JPMorgan Chase, Frito-Lay and Keurig Dr Pepper. The result is a daytime population that swells well past the resident count and a reverse commute into Plano every morning.

The other end of the city is the opposite in scale. Downtown Plano, around 15th Street and Avenue K, is the original town center: two-story brick storefronts, a theatre, restaurants and the Interurban Railway Museum in the 1908 depot of the electric line that once ran to Dallas and Denison. The DART Red Line follows roughly the same corridor today, and its Downtown Plano station put a light rail platform within a block of the old depot when it opened in 2002.

Plano also carries an unusually large amount of open space for a built-out suburb. Oak Point Park and Nature Preserve on Rowlett Creek and Arbor Hills Nature Preserve on the west side are both several hundred acres, and a concrete trail network follows the creek bottoms across the city, which is the practical reason the arterial grid can be crossed on foot at all.