Dallas, Texas map

Dallas sits in North Texas about 70 miles south of the Oklahoma line. Unlike Houston it has no port and no single natural reason to exist; it grew as a rail crossroads in the 1870s and stayed one. Today four interstates meet here: I-20, I-30, I-35E and I-45, plus the I-635 (LBJ Freeway) loop.

The city stretches into Collin, Denton, Kaufman and Rockwall counties. The metroplex adds Fort Worth, Arlington, Plano, Irving, Garland, Frisco, McKinney, Grand Prairie, Mesquite, Carrollton and Denton.

Dallas County counted 2,613,539 people in 2020 across 909 square miles, making it the second-most populous county in Texas after Harris. It borders Collin to the northeast, Rockwall to the east, Kaufman to the southeast, Ellis to the south, Tarrant to the west and Denton to the northwest. About 1.22 million of the city's residents live inside Dallas County; the rest are in the four counties the city limits reach into. Irving, Garland, Mesquite, Grand Prairie, Richardson, Carrollton, DeSoto, Duncanville, Lancaster, Rowlett and Cedar Hill are separate cities in the same county, while Highland Park, University Park and Addison sit as enclaves inside or hard against the Dallas city limits.

Two interchanges do most of the work. The High Five, where US-75 meets I-635 in north Dallas, stacks five levels of ramps and opened in 2005; the Mixmaster, where I-30 and I-35E tangle at the southwest corner of downtown, is the older and tighter of the pair. I-345, the elevated half-mile between I-45 and US-75 on the east side of downtown, is what lets Houston traffic reach Central Expressway, and is the subject of a long argument about whether to rebuild it below grade.

John Neely Bryan picked this spot in 1841 for a reason that is easy to miss now: a natural rock ford where the Trinity River could be crossed, under a low bluff on the east bank near what is now Dealey Plaza. The river itself was never much use — attempts to run steamboats up to Dallas failed — so the crossing mattered more than the water. The railroads then confirmed the choice. The Houston & Texas Central arrived from the south in 1872 and the Texas & Pacific crossed it east–west in 1873, and the intersection of those two lines made Dallas a distribution point, first for cotton, later for machinery, oil-field supply and everything else. The city has no port, no mountain and no harbor; it has a crossing.

The Elm Fork and the West Fork of the Trinity meet just west of downtown near the Irving line, and the combined river runs southeast toward Trinity Bay. After the flood of May 1908 put the bottomlands under water and cut Oak Cliff off from downtown, Dallas hired George Kessler to plan the city, and over the following decades the river was straightened into a channel between two earthen levees set a few thousand feet apart. The result is the Trinity floodway: a wide strip of grass, river and nothing else separating downtown from Oak Cliff. The Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, opened in 2012, and the pedestrian Continental Avenue bridge beside it cross it at the north end; I-35E, I-30, Sylvan Avenue and Corinth Street cross it further along.

Dallas Area Rapid Transit opened the region's first light rail in 1996 and now runs four lines, all of which pass through downtown on the Pacific Avenue and Bryan Street pair and meet at West End and Akard.

The Trinity Railway Express, run jointly with Fort Worth, links Union Station downtown with Fort Worth by way of CentrePort near the airport. Amtrak's Texas Eagle uses the same Union Station, beside Reunion Tower.

Dallas/Fort Worth International opened in 1974 on about 27 square miles between the two cities, straddling the Dallas–Tarrant county line — more ground than the island of Manhattan, and one of the busiest airports in the world. It was built because Dallas and Fort Worth could not agree to share either of their existing fields, and it took nearly all the airline traffic away from Love Field.

Love Field sits six miles northwest of downtown, inside the city, off I-35E at Mockingbird Lane. To protect the new airport, the Wright Amendment of 1979 barred airlines there from flying nonstop beyond Texas and its neighbouring states; the limits were loosened in stages and lifted entirely in October 2014, with the field capped at 20 gates instead. Southwest Airlines, which began flying out of Love Field in 1971 and fought the rule for decades, has its headquarters on the northeast side of the field.