The FM 1488 Median's Deadline Runs Out June 30. Still No Word.

The raised-median project is the east-corridor job most drivers know by its U-turn lanes: a $10.23 million build running roughly nine miles from Mostyn Drive to I-45, adding five new traffic signals along the way. It broke ground in July 2023. The state's stated finish line has always been the second quarter of 2026. We are now inside the last three weeks of that quarter.

The most recent status figure anyone has published is seven months old. As of late November 2025, the project stood at 87% complete. Since then, the corridor's public reporting has refreshed the two widening projects and left the median out. We flagged that gap on June 5. Twenty-one days from the deadline, it has not closed.

The record

What it is

Raised median, U-turn lanes, and 5 new traffic signals, Mostyn Drive to I-45 — about 9 miles.

Cost

$10.23 million.

Started

July 2023.

Last public status

87% complete, late November 2025.

Deadline

Second quarter of 2026 — the quarter ends June 30.

Updates since

The April corridor roundup updated both widening projects and did not mention the median.

Why a missing number matters.

A deadline with no status attached can mean two very different things, and they are not close. The project may be finished, or all but, with the paperwork trailing the asphalt the way it did on the west-end widening. Or it may be running behind, with a quarter about to expire that won't be met. Those outcomes look identical from the driver's seat right now. The only thing that tells them apart is a number from the agency, and that number has not come.

We went looking for it again before this edition. The figures floating around the corridor do not agree with one another, and none of them arrives with a date and a source we would stake a deadline story on. So we are doing what we said we would: we are not printing a percentage we cannot stand behind. The honest state of the record is that the last reliable median figure is the November 87%, and everything after it is either unpublished or unverified.

What we've asked, and what's next.

The fix here is not complicated. One dated line from TxDOT — current percent complete and whether the second-quarter target holds — would answer the whole question. That is the update we are seeking, and we will publish it in full the moment it exists, whatever it says. If June 30 arrives and the quarter closes with no status on a nine-mile, ten-million-dollar public project, that absence is itself a finding, and we will report it as one.

None of this is an argument against the work. The median exists because left-turn crashes on this road were a documented, rising problem, and managed turns are the standard answer. The question is narrower and fair: a public deadline is 21 days out, and the public is owed a straight sentence on whether it will be met.

Editor's note on format — We ran this as straight reporting because every figure here is a matter of public record, and the gap we describe is the absence of a record, not a contested community decision. Where the record is silent, we say so rather than fill it. This piece carries a stable pen-name byline, per our ethics policy; the reporting is real, the name is changed.