Drive north on Loop 360 toward Courtyard Drive on a weekend night this fall and you'll likely hit an orange sign, a closed ramp, and a detour onto the frontage road. It happened the weekend of July 31 through August 2, when crews shut the northbound exit to RM 2222 and the North Courtyard Drive access nightly from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. It will happen again. Ask most people in West Lake Hills how much longer this goes on and you'll get some version of the same answer: not much longer, it's almost done.
That answer is wrong, and knowing why matters more than it sounds like it should. West Lake Hills isn't in the middle of one long construction project. It just finished one and started a different one, and the two have gotten tangled together in the retelling.
Two Projects, Not One
The Westlake Drive and Cedar Street segment of Loop 360 is the older story. TxDOT built underpasses at both intersections so through traffic no longer has to stop at what used to be signaled crossings, and the new Cedar Street bridge opened around the end of 2025. That project has been winding down through the first half of 2026.
The Courtyard Drive and RM 2222 segment is a different animal entirely. TxDOT held a groundbreaking ceremony in late April 2026 for a $68.4 million rebuild, funded jointly by the agency and the City of Austin's 2016 mobility bond, that will sink Loop 360's main lanes below Courtyard Drive and reconfigure the RM 2222 intersection into a diverging diamond interchange, the kind of layout that shifts traffic to the left side of the road specifically to cut down on conflict points for left turns. TxDOT's own project page puts the finish line at late 2029.
Here's the comparison worth keeping straight:
| Project | Where it stood as of September 2026 | Expected finish |
|---|---|---|
| Westlake Drive & Cedar Street underpass | Cedar Street bridge open; project wrapping up | Mid-2026 |
| Courtyard Drive & RM 2222 diverging diamond | Cliff stabilization complete; main construction underway | Late 2029 |
One of these is closing out. The other is just getting started. If your mental model of "the Loop 360 work" is a single blur of orange cones, you're carrying an outdated map into a three-year commute.
What Actually Wrapped This Year
The Cedar Street underpass is the visible marker, but it wasn't the only piece of West Lake Hills municipal life that closed a chapter recently. The city's own administrative offices and police department moved into a new complex at 4010 Bee Caves Road in mid-August 2025, replacing whatever building you used to picture when someone mentioned City Hall. If you haven't had reason to visit in a while, the address you have saved is no longer current.
What's Just Getting Started at Courtyard
Before the diverging diamond work could begin, TxDOT had to deal with a rockslide that damaged the limestone cliffs on the west side of Loop 360 in May 2024. Crews removed an estimated 155,000 cubic yards of rock during the stabilization phase, timed in part around migratory bird patterns, and that excavation wrapped in spring 2026, clearing the way for the interchange construction that broke ground weeks later.
The change with the longest reach for daily life isn't on the roadway itself. It's at the informal pullout north of Courtyard Drive where residents have taken out-of-town guests to watch the sunset over Pennybacker Bridge for two decades. The new interchange configuration removes the shoulder where cars currently park for that view. In December 2024, Austin's City Council voted to acquire roughly 1.5 acres between west Courtyard Drive and Loop 360 to build formal parking, wider sidewalks, and expanded trail access to the overlook. TxDOT and the city are still finalizing that piece, so the overlook isn't disappearing, but the free-for-all shoulder parking that made it work is.
The Other Confusion: Streets vs. Highway
There's a second construction thread running through the neighborhood this summer that has nothing to do with TxDOT and gets folded into the Loop 360 story anyway. On June 24, 2026, the West Lake Hills City Council approved a roughly $1.7 million contract with Alpha Paving Industries to crack-seal and mill-and-overlay 31 streets across the city, funded by the Street Maintenance Sales Tax Program that voters approved in 2021 and reauthorized for eight more years in November 2025. Work started July 6 and has been moving block by block since.
If you've watched a crew milling asphalt somewhere off Yaupon Valley or Oak Ridge and assumed it connects to the highway project down at Courtyard Drive, it doesn't. One is a state interchange rebuild that will still be underway when today's kindergartners are in middle school. The other is a routine repaving cycle that will be finished long before that.
The Reservation Rule Wild Basin Residents Still Forget
While the roads sort themselves out, the rules at Wild Basin Wilderness Preserve haven't changed at all, which is exactly why they're easy to get wrong. The 227-acre preserve, jointly managed by Travis County and St. Edward's University since 1974, draws a hard line between weekdays and weekends. Show up Monday through Friday and there's no entrance fee and no reservation required. Show up Saturday, Sunday, or a federal holiday and you need to book a hiking pass online first, along with a small admission charge, five dollars for adults and three for youth ages six through seventeen. Summer hours run 7 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., and the parking lot is small enough that the gate closes once it fills.
The practical translation: the Arroyo Vista Loop, a 0.6-mile circuit that includes the preserve's scenic overlook, is the frictionless weekday option. The longer Creek Loop, roughly 1.5 miles with crossings over Bee Creek and a waterfall at the end of it, is the one worth saving for a reserved Saturday morning, when you've got the time to actually use the extra distance. The Ledge Trail, at 0.8 miles along a natural limestone outcrop, splits the difference.
What Filled In While the Asphalt Was Torn Up
West Lake Hills caps new commercial square footage tightly, which means growth here rarely looks like a new building going up. It looks like small storefronts filling space that already existed. A cluster of openings along Bee Cave Road this year makes that pattern visible if you know where to look.
- Peoples Wellness, the pharmacy long known as Peoples Rx, reopened in February 2026 in a new spot off Bee Cave Road after leaving its longtime Westbank Drive address, adding medication compounding and personalized wellness consultations to a full-service pharmacy that has run continuously since 1981.
- French Florist opened along Bee Cave Road this year, offering arrangements and same-day delivery from a storefront that didn't exist twelve months ago.
- Taqueria de Diez opened its third location in West Lake Hills this spring, following its first Austin spot downtown in 2024.
- A build-out permit is on file with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation for a Postino wine café in West Lake Hills, though no opening date has been announced.
- A private indoor golf club, The Mackenzie Club, is planned near Bee Caves Road for a late 2026 opening.
None of these on its own changes how a Tuesday evening feels along that corridor. Together, in a city that can't add square footage the way Austin proper does, they're the clearest sign that the neighborhood's retail base is still filling in even while the roads around it are torn up.
The Next Six Weeks
Austin Restaurant Weeks runs through September 13, with a portion of prix fixe proceeds benefiting the Central Texas Food Bank, so there are only a few days left to catch it. Bat Fest, which landed on September 5, already came and went for the year. Looking ahead, the AIA Austin Homes Tour on October 24 and 25 is the one that tends to matter most locally, since a meaningful share of the featured houses each year sit inside 78746 and the neighborhoods immediately to its east. Westlake Wonderfest closes out the calendar on December 6, from 1 to 4 p.m. at Westlake High School, free for anyone who wants an afternoon of holiday programming without a headline act attached.
Knowing which of these is still open, which has passed, and which is worth planning around now is a smaller version of the same skill the Loop 360 confusion demands: distinguishing what's actually current from what's simply been repeated so often it sounds settled.
That distinction is most of what changes this fall in West Lake Hills. The Cedar Street light is gone for good. The Courtyard Drive wait is only beginning. Both can be true at once, and only one of them should still be shaping how you plan a Friday night commute.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a specific street, a specific commute, or a home you're watching in the neighborhood, the team at Local Life tracks these details closely because they shape daily life well before they show up in a listing. Schedule a Private Consultation and we'll walk through what it actually means for you.
