A new $4.6 million pedestrian and bicycle bridge is planned for North Lamar Boulevard in North Austin, set to run right alongside the existing vehicle bridge over Walnut Creek. The span would give cyclists, dog walkers, families and other visitors to Walnut Creek Metropolitan Park a way to cross the creek without competing with traffic on one of the city's most dangerous roadways.
The project is documented in an official Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation registration filed on August 14, listing an estimated cost of $4,674,780, according to state records cited by Chron. That filing lists Freese and Nichols Inc., an Austin-based firm, as the design team behind the structure, which is planned to include a shared-use path on both sides. As of publication, the City of Austin's Urban Trails team had not responded to a request for comment, per the same filing.
State registration records put the target construction start date at September 2027, with an estimated completion by mid-April 2028, though timelines on state-owned corridors in Austin often shift as the city and the Texas Department of Transportation coordinate on delivery. The bridge is one piece of a broader overhaul of the North Lamar Boulevard corridor between U.S. 183 and Howard Lane, focused on mobility, safety and connectivity improvements along one of the city's busiest arterial streets.
A Corridor With a Deadly Track Record
North Lamar Boulevard sits on Austin's Vision Zero High-Injury Network, a designation for the roughly 8% of city roadways that account for nearly 60% of all severe injury and fatal traffic crashes, according to the City of Austin. The corridor's history of pedestrian deaths is not abstract for North Austin residents. Hoodline previously reported a pedestrian was killed near 9523 N. Lamar Blvd in a fatal crash this spring, and a separate fatal auto-pedestrian collision struck the 9600 block in September 2025.
City leaders flagged North Lamar as a high-priority corridor as far back as 2019, when Austin broke ground on roughly $66.8 million in planned mobility improvements along the same stretch between U.S. 183 and Howard Lane, as reported by Community Impact. Those upgrades were designed to bring improved sidewalks, bike lanes and traffic signals between Rundberg and Parmer lanes, along with bicycle and pedestrian improvements between U.S. 183 and Rundberg Lane that include new bus stops, driveways and ADA-compliant curb ramps.
Funding Traces Back to the 2016 Mobility Bond
The broader corridor project draws its funding from the 2016 Austin Mobility Bond, the $720 million package voters approved that November to address citywide traffic congestion and pedestrian safety. Of that total, $482 million was set aside specifically for the Corridor Construction Program covering nine major arterial roadways, including North Lamar Boulevard, and Community Impact reported the city was nearing full allocation of those bond dollars as of January 2026.
A separate $500,000 project registered with the state in December 2025 calls for installing two Pedestrian Hybrid Beacons and related crossing improvements along North Lamar near the Walnut Creek Bridge. Those push-button signals are designed to stop vehicle traffic long enough for pedestrians to cross the wide arterial safely, complementing the planned bridge just steps away.
Linking Into a Growing Trail Network
The new bridge would connect directly to trail infrastructure already in place. In March 2023, the Austin Parks and Recreation Department and the Public Works Urban Trails Program opened Section 2A of the Northern Walnut Creek Trail, a 1.3-mile, 12-foot-wide concrete path running from Walnut Creek Metropolitan Park east under Lamar Boulevard. An anonymous city employee told Axios Austin in 2023 that heavy traffic and poor visibility near Walnut Creek Park Road and North Lamar Boulevard made accessing the park stressful for visitors, a concern the new crossing is meant to address.
The trail segment itself traces back to a 2020 upgrade at the Northern Walnut Creek Trail crossing at North Lamar, which was designed to separate cyclists and pedestrians from vehicle traffic at that intersection. That earlier work laid the groundwork for the larger trail system now taking shape, one first proposed by the Austin Parks and Recreation Department in the late 1990s and designed to eventually stretch 19 to 20 miles from Balcones District Park in Northwest Austin to Govalle Park in East Austin.
Part of a Larger 30-Mile Vision
The North Lamar bridge and the Walnut Creek trail network also feed into Austin's planned 30-mile regional Big Loop, a citywide trail circuit meant to connect the Northern Walnut Creek Trail, Southern Walnut Creek Trail, MoKan Trail, Red Line Parkway and Shoal Creek Trail, according to the Shoal Creek Conservancy. Hoodline recently covered construction on a matching prefab bridge in East Austin, another connecting piece of the same regional loop.
For now, the North Lamar bridge remains in the planning and permitting stage, with construction not expected to begin until September 2027 at the earliest. But for a corridor that has already claimed lives and drawn repeated safety warnings, the promise of a dedicated crossing over Walnut Creek marks a tangible step toward separating people on foot and bike from the traffic that has made this stretch of North Lamar one of the city's most hazardous.
