Dallas Dept. of Transportation misses deadlines for responding to road complaints thousands of times

Dallas residents worried about dangerous roads are filing complaints with the city's transportation department, but according to records obtained by NBC 5 Investigates, many of those concerns are not being addressed within the timeframe required by the city's own rules.

The records showed thousands of cases in which the Dallas Department of Transportation did not promptly resolve complaints about traffic dangers. They also raised questions about how often the city simply closes complaints without implementing solutions to the problem.

An NBC 5 viewer in Northeast Dallas said she reported a dangerous area for pedestrians and that her complaint was quickly closed. But, more than a year later, the city had not made changes to address safety concerns at that location. NBC 5 Investigates visited the woman's neighborhood to look into her complaint and to conduct an experiment to see why the area has seen crashes involving pedestrians.

On a sidewalk in front of an apartment building on Forest Lane, NBC 5 Investigates set out with the simple goal of getting to a bus stop on the other side of the six-lane street.

With no crosswalks in the immediate area, we walked four minutes down the block to the nearest crossing.

After waiting two minutes at the light, we finally crossed the street six minutes after we started. Walking back up the block, we had to stop at the entrance to a neighborhood where, again, there was no crosswalk.

As we tried to cross the street, a vehicle turned right in front of us, apparently unaware of our presence. From there, it was about another half-block to the bus stop.

The walk down the block to the crosswalk and back up the other side to the bus stop took 12 minutes and 20 seconds. If a person took the bus to and from work every day, the nearly 25 minutes they would save by jaywalking might explain why so many people risk simply crossing the street without walking to a crossing.

"It's just very dangerous for them to do that," said Alyson Thompson, who lives nearby and said she'd seen a number of high-speed crashes in the area. "There are pedestrians that are in this area. There are vehicles that are going way too fast. We're at a high risk for having another serious injury or death at this intersection."

NBC 5 Investigates looked at records from the Texas Department of Transportation and discovered that over five years about 100 crashes occurred in a half-mile stretch of Forest Lane near Audelia Road. In six of those crashes, cars hit pedestrians.

After a speeding driver killed a pedestrian in November 2022, Thompson filed a complaint with the city's 311 system and asked for a stoplight to be added on Forest Lane near the entrance of her neighborhood.

"When does it become important enough for Dallas to take action on this type of intersection, which is dangerous, where there've been multiple accidents, where a pedestrian has been killed?" Thompson asked.

City records obtained by NBC 5 Investigates showed Thompson's complaint was routed to the Dallas Department of Transportation. The records showed she was told that the department had "60 business days to complete your service request" and that the city sent a traffic engineer to inspect the intersection. The engineer discussed conducting a traffic count to see if a new stop light was warranted in the area. The records showed the city then closed the complaint.

"But closed doesn't mean that it's resolved because nothing's different," Thompson said.

NBC 5 Investigates discovered Thompson is one of five people who made 311 complaints about speeds in the area. In January 2023, another resident requested a speed limit change, saying, "This area of Forest Lane is deceptively sloped …" and that "Jaywalking is awful, too, which makes higher speed more dangerous."

The records showed that the complaint was left open for more than a year. The city's own service rules say speed limit change requests should be closed within 45 days, but NBC 5 Investigates found that the city's transportation department missed the required target dates for completing 311 requests thousands of times.

The 311 data reviewed by NBC 5 Investigates showed the department missed the deadline more than 10,000 times over four years. Another 2,200 complaints were marked as overdue for a response.

The department did not close complaints in the required timeframe more often than not. The records showed that in more than 177,000 cases, the department did meet the target. But what's not clear is how often the city took action in those cases.

Remember, Thompson's complaint was closed on time, but the intersection looks the same more than a year later, leaving her wondering what a "closed" complaint means.

In a statement, a city spokesperson told NBC 5 Investigates that even if a complaint is closed that doesn't mean it's not being addressed by the city's transportation department or another department. The city told NBC 5 Investigates that a traffic analysis of the location along Forest Lane is still in progress.

"I just don't know how much longer we have to wait. And somebody has already died here," Thompson said.

NBC 5 Investigates has learned the Dallas City Auditor plans to review how the transportation department responds to 311 requests, but that audit has not started yet. In a statement, the Dallas Department of Transportation said it was "reviewing the established service level agreement time," which is the time frame set for requests to be completed. The department also said the time frames "… may be extended to more accurately reflect the time-intensive process for reviewing the volume of requests received…"

The city said it can take time to address some complaints because each concern is different and that there is a process for some resolutions. For instance, installing a traffic light would take longer than 30 or 45 days, would require a traffic study, and could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to install.

However, in a recent City Council meeting, some council members indicated they wanted to address how to speed up the traffic study process so that the transportation department can respond to dangerous locations more quickly.