Since Sunday, Aug. 30, you can drive Loop 360 past Westlake Drive and Cedar Street without stopping at a red light. Construction on that interchange started in June 2022. That's more than four years of lane shifts, excavation and temporary mainlanes, and they ended in a single weekend. The new lanes are the most visible piece of a pattern running through West Lake Hills this fall. Most of what's changing is the end of something that started years ago. The road, the water plant near Redbud Trail and even a pizza counter on Bee Caves Road are all reaching finish dates between now and the end of the year.
Four years of construction, now one lane each way
The project took the traffic signals off the Loop 360 mainlanes by building bridges at both intersections. For now TxDOT has opened one mainlane in each direction. Here's how it works day to day:
- To go through, stay in the left lane. It passes both signals.
- To reach Westlake Drive or Cedar Street, exit right onto the connector roads, which still serve both streets.
- To turn around without a signal, use the U-turns on the Westlake Drive bridge. They give access to both northbound and southbound Loop 360.
- Heading south past Bold Ruler Way, the southbound U-turn south of Bold Ruler stays open.
The project isn't finished yet. TxDOT breaks the work into five phases. The last one, final paving and striping before permanent traffic patterns open, hasn't started. Phases two through four are still listed as ongoing. North of the new bridges, crews are still excavating the mainlanes between Bold Ruler Way and the Pennybacker Bridge. They dig weekdays from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., and haul at night. That night hauling is why the next closure starts tonight. The left lane of the connector road between the Pennybacker Bridge and the Shell Refuel station closes in both directions from Sunday, Oct. 4, through Thursday, Oct. 8, from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m.
TxDOT and the contractor, Copasa Group, still expect the whole project to wrap up in late 2026, weather permitting. The project schedule has held at that target since the KXAN report on the lane opening in late August.
The water plant off Redbud Trail is closing out its own projects
Lake Austin has a quieter version of the same story. Austin Water's Ullrich Water Treatment Plant has two upgrades scheduled to finish in 2026, and neither one adds capacity. Austin Water describes its Ullrich work as improvements inside the plant's existing footprint.
The first is a $15 million Process Drain and Support Systems project. It covers an automated sludge crossover vault, a rebuilt instrument-air loop, a larger clarifier-flushing system and a hot-water wash for the centrifuges. Temporary pumps were scheduled to go into service in December 2025. The second is a $35 million renewal of the 15-kV substation that powers the plant's low-service pumps. It includes a new substation building, a duct bank and an access road. Austin Water says that work is underway and should be finished this year.
For the streets closest to the plant, the bigger question is noise. Austin Water's acoustic consultants measured near Rocky River Road, Rocky River Cove and Rocky Creek Drive. The loudest sources they found were the blowers that move lime from delivery trucks and the periodic cleaning of the treatment basins. The difference between the truck-mounted blower and the plant's indoor blower is large. At Rocky River Road, truck-mounted lime blowing measured 52 dBA. With the indoor blower it measured under 47. At Rocky River Cove the numbers were 45 dBA and under 41. Austin Water put the indoor blower back in service and now requires its use. It also moved sludge-truck parking and weighing away from neighbors to the southwest, banned idling, and limited deliveries, maintenance and construction to daytime hours.
The next step also has a 2026 date on it. Kennedy Jenks won a sound-mitigation contract in August 2025. In its November 2025 neighbor meeting, Austin Water said a silencer for the lime blower would be installed in 2026 and that it would decide by 2026 whether other options, such as barriers, are feasible. Kennedy Jenks' earlier modeling estimated the silencer could cut another 6 dBA on top of the reduction from the indoor blower.
The update on all of this comes Monday, Oct. 19, at 5:30 p.m. at West Lake Hills City Hall, 4010 Bee Cave Road. The meeting was moved from Sept. 21 because of a scheduling conflict. It will be the fifth neighbor meeting Austin Water has held on the plant since May 2023. The contact listed for questions is Mary Anne Connolly, at 512-972-2180 or [email protected]. The next big job is a conversion away from chlorine and ammonia gas, and its start date is still unsettled. Austin Water's own documents put the start anywhere from fall 2026 to 2027 or 2028.
On Bee Cave Road, opening dates mostly held
Businesses along the Bee Cave Road and Loop 360 corridor turned over at their usual pace this year. Most of them opened close to the dates they announced. Here's the timeline since spring:
- April: Back Nine opened an indoor golf simulator at Davenport Village, 3801 N. Capital of Texas Hwy., Ste. D-160.
- Spring: Taqueria de Diez opened at 3736 Bee Cave Road, Ste. 2. It had been in the permit stage when Community Impact reported on it on April 27.
- June 8: Maverick Men's Health opened at 4238 Bee Cave Road.
- Aug. 3: Material Bespoke Stone + Tile moved out of Westlake to 3010 W. Anderson Lane.
- Aug. 10: Baldinucci Pizza Romana closed its flagship at 3300 Bee Caves Road, Ste. 110, for renovations.
- Aug. 28: House of Shan, a clothing and accessories shop, opened at 8907 Bee Cave Road.
- Sept. 13: Postino opened at the Village at Westlake, 701 S. Capital of Texas Hwy., Ste. J760. The company had announced a late-summer target in July.
Postino's mid-September opening came within about two weeks of the end of summer. Taqueria de Diez went from a permit listing to open in one season. Projects that stall happen too, but none of them appear on this list.
What still has a date on the calendar
The rest of the fall is a short list of things wrapping up. Baldinucci is due back in November, and it's coming back bigger. The dining room is growing from 12 seats to 54. For a counter that used to seat about a dozen people, that's a change in what a visit can look like.
Teriyaki Madness's Westlake location is the one opening on this list that has moved. In March, a permit estimated construction would finish by the end of that month. As of a Sept. 4 report, the restaurant was still in permitting on Bee Cave Road, with a tentative opening in early December. The Mackenzie Club, an indoor golf club with a restaurant and beverage bar at 260 Addie Roy Road, announced in January that it planned to open in late 2026.
These are the dates to keep in mind:
- Oct. 4 to 8, overnight: left-lane closures on the Loop 360 connector road between the Pennybacker Bridge and the Shell Refuel station
- Oct. 19, 5:30 p.m.: Ullrich neighbor meeting at City Hall
- November: Baldinucci reopens with 54 seats
- Early December: Teriyaki Madness's tentative opening
- Late 2026: final paving and striping at Westlake Drive and Cedar Street, Austin Water's 2026 target for the lime-blower silencer, and the Mackenzie Club's planned opening
The city's own October and November calendars are mostly civic meetings and yard-waste pickup days, plus the Ullrich meeting. In West Lake Hills this year, the biggest changes on the calendar are projects wrapping up.
If the new Loop 360 layout has you rethinking your commute, or the Ullrich timeline is a factor in your plans for your home, I'm glad to talk through what these finish dates mean for your street. Christine Hsu follows these projects closely. Schedule your free concierge consultation, and we'll go over it together.
