Two, maybe five, would create that impression. I've never heard of 54 hearings for any planned project. Have you?
No.
TXDOT takes the identical smoke and mirror dog and pony show to 54 locations. The last one I attended was just easel-sized blowups of pages from their razzle-dazzle website -- with a bunch of high-dollar "hired guns" (AKA "consultants") there to "explain" them...
IOW, a huge waste of taxpayer dollars to cover TXDOT's @$$ so they could say they "got public input"...