A lot of people move to Anna for the same reason: you get more house, and a bit of a hometown feel, in exchange for sitting farther up the highway than you would in Plano or Frisco. The city leans into that identity — the official motto is “Your Hometown,” and the council-manager government under Mayor Pete Cain has kept the small-town branding even as the population blew past 35,000. The open question for anyone considering the move is what that distance costs you every morning. Here is the honest version.
US-75 is the whole story
Anna’s commute begins and ends with one road: U.S. 75, the North Central Expressway. It is the spine of the entire north-Dallas corridor, running as a freeway from Dallas up through Plano and McKinney and continuing north past Anna to Van Alstyne. Anna sits roughly 45 miles north of downtown Dallas along it. There is no alternate interstate that quietly gets you around a bad day on 75 — for the long-haul southbound trip, this is the route, which means your commute is only ever as good as the corridor is on a given morning.
The practical upshot is that where you work along that line matters enormously, because the distances stack up fast as you head south.
Working in McKinney: the easy version
If your job is in McKinney, Anna is genuinely convenient. McKinney is the next major city down 75, and the drive is short enough that plenty of Anna residents treat it as their everyday hub for work, shopping, and errands. This is the commute Anna is best suited for — close enough that the highway distance barely registers, while you still get Anna’s newer housing and lower-key feel at the end of the day. For a household with at least one earner working in or around McKinney, Anna makes a lot of sense.
Working in Plano: the middle case
Plano sits farther down the corridor, deeper into the dense employment core of the north suburbs. It is a very doable commute from Anna, but it is a real one — you are covering more of US-75 through progressively busier interchanges. This is the profile where your tolerance for morning traffic starts to matter, and where leaving earlier or later to dodge the peak becomes a genuine lifestyle decision rather than a rounding error.
Working in Dallas: the long haul
A downtown Dallas job from Anna is the roughly 45-mile end of the spectrum, and there is no way to make that a short drive. People do it — the more-house-for-the-money trade is worth it to plenty of families — but you should go in clear-eyed. This is the commute you accept in exchange for what Anna offers, not one you can optimize your way out of. If a downtown Dallas office is your daily destination, weigh it carefully against how much time you are willing to spend on 75.
The train is a drive away
Here is the piece that surprises transplants coming from more transit-served suburbs: Anna is not in the DART service area. There is no rail station in town and no local DART bus network to lean on. The nearest passenger rail is the DART Red Line at the Parker Road Station in Plano, which is itself a drive south from Anna.
That makes Anna effectively an all-car town for commuting, with a drive-to-rail option for the specific case of a downtown or Red Line-adjacent job. If your workplace sits near the Red Line, driving to Parker Road, parking, and taking the train in can beat fighting the last stretch of highway and downtown parking. But for most Anna commuters, most days, the car does the whole trip. If transit access is a hard requirement for your household, this is the single most important thing to understand before buying here.
Getting around town: SH-5 and FM 455
Once you are off the highway, Anna’s own street grid runs on two main arterials. State Highway 5 — Powell Parkway — is the north-south spine through the historic center, and FM 455, which becomes White Street in town, is the main east-west route. Between them they connect most of the city’s older core and its newer subdivisions to the US-75 interchanges.
Worth knowing if you are watching the town evolve: Anna has been actively working to knit its east and west sides together across the highway and rail line. In 2025 the city undertook a boring project along FM 455 aimed at improving that east-west connection, and completed paving and utility work expanding Leonard Avenue. These are the kind of unglamorous local-road projects that quietly determine how smoothly your in-town drive goes, even if they never make the traffic report.
The bottom line
Anna rewards a specific commuting profile. If you or your partner work in or near McKinney, the highway distance is a non-issue and the trade for newer, more affordable housing is easy to justify. Plano is workable with some traffic tolerance. A daily downtown Dallas drive is a real 45-mile commitment along a single corridor, softened only slightly by the drive-to-rail option at Parker Road. Know which of those you are signing up for before you fall for the house, because in Anna, the highway is not a detail — it is the deal.
