Most evenings, the stretch of Woodway Drive between Chimney Rock and Post Oak carries the same small parade. A dog walker cuts over from Tanglewood Park at Bering. A jogger angles toward Memorial Park. A cyclist threads the gap between traffic exiting the Uptown Park shopping center and the tree line beyond it. None of this was planned by anyone. The route exists because people made it exist, crossing a stretch of Woodway that was never built for foot traffic, then hunting for a gap in the fence line that leads into one of the park's unmarked entrances.
That improvised crossing is about to become the actual front door of one of the largest pedestrian infrastructure projects Houston has funded in years, and it is landing on the same block Tanglewood residents already use to get there.
The Route You Already Take Is Getting a Name
Ask anyone who has tried to walk from Tanglewood into Memorial Park without a car, and they will describe some version of the same workaround: cross Woodway near Post Oak, watch for cars turning off the West Loop feeder, then pick a way through to whichever trail happens to be closest. There is no signal here and no marked crossing.
Houston City Council gave that stretch of Woodway a formal upgrade on June 17, 2026, approving a public improvement development agreement for what the ordinance names the West Loop Shared Use Pathway and Bridge Project. The plan puts a shared-use trail and bridge across Loop 610 near Buffalo Bayou, landing between Post Oak Boulevard and Woodway Drive, the same block where the informal crossing already happens every day. District C council member Joe Panzarella, whose district includes the site, described it as a bridge that gives residents better connectivity and mobility across the city. Memorial Park Conservancy president Chris Ballard put it more simply, calling the project "an accessible hike and bike path into the Park" that Houstonians had been asking for since the park's master plan was first drawn up.
The financing goes back further than this summer's vote. In 2025, Uptown Houston secured an $18.5 million grant from the Texas Department of Transportation along with a $4 million federal earmark, and reporting at the time priced the project near $22 million. This summer's city ordinance updated that figure to roughly $22.5 million, funded through grants from the Federal Transit Administration and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, with the ordinance specifying that the city carries no funding obligation of its own. The numbers moved a little as the deal firmed up. The location did not: Post Oak to Woodway, the exact corner Tanglewood residents already cross on foot.
What the Path Actually Looks Like
The trail begins behind the Uptown Park shopping center, where a surface parking lot is being converted into an 8- to 10-foot-wide trail corridor. From there it reaches a new mid-block pedestrian crossing, engineered specifically to make the busy intersection near Post Oak safer to cross on foot, before climbing onto the project's centerpiece: a 350-foot suspension bridge over Buffalo Bayou, carried on steel towers roughly 50 feet tall, with a bridge deck about 14 feet wide, wide enough for two-way bike and foot traffic to share without one group yielding to the other.
On the west side, the path crosses Woodway Drive again, the same road that runs past Tanglewood's own neighborhood park, before entering Memorial Park through what was once the Old Archery Range and tying into the park's existing trail network. Once inside, it connects to the park's broader Bayou Wilds trail system, which the Memorial Park Conservancy describes as offering an immersive nature experience with views of Buffalo Bayou and the surrounding riparian forest.
Three Bridges, Three Timelines
Memorial Park's master plan has produced enough bridges and land projects over the past few years that it is easy to mix them up if you are not tracking each one closely. Here is how they differ.
- The Kinder Land Bridge, opened in 2023, carries walkers and cyclists over Memorial Drive on a reseeded 100-acre prairie, reuniting the park's north and south halves. It is finished, and Tanglewood runners already use it to loop through the Eastern Glades.
- Memorial Groves, a separate 100-acre project on the park's western edge honoring the soldiers who trained at Camp Logan during World War I, is under construction now with completion targeted for late 2027. The Kinder Foundation contributed an additional $10 million toward the project's $50.5 million budget.
- The new Uptown bridge is a third, distinct structure. It does not cross Memorial Drive at all. It crosses Buffalo Bayou and Loop 610 to link the park to Uptown, and unlike the other two, it exists primarily to solve a pedestrian access problem rather than to add parkland.
If you have noticed two separate construction zones near the park's western edge this year, that is why. They are not the same project, and they are not on the same schedule.
What Changes for the Walk You Already Take
Uptown Houston's own timeline had construction starting in spring 2026, with the heavier work scheduled to ramp up once this summer's World Cup matches wrapped. That puts full construction underway right around now, which means the informal Woodway crossing Tanglewood residents already use is likely to get messier before it gets better. Expect lane shifts and detours around the Uptown Park lot as the trailhead and the new mid-block crossing take shape over the coming months.
Once finished, an estimate Uptown Houston floated last year points to sometime in 2027, the walk that currently means watching for traffic and squeezing through a gap in the fence becomes a lit, marked route with its own dedicated bridge. That route connects directly into the park's Seymour Lieberman Exer-Trail, the 2.93-mile crushed granite loop that already ranks among the most heavily used running routes in the entire state. For someone leaving from Tanglewood Park at Bering and Woodway, the practical effect is a car-free option into the park's main trail system that does not currently exist in any official form. Right now, getting there on foot means treating a city street like an obstacle. In a little over a year, it should mean crossing a bridge built for exactly that purpose.
None of this changes what a house on a given Tanglewood block is worth this week. It does change what the walk from that house will look like a year from now, and for people who chose this neighborhood partly for its proximity to Memorial Park, that is worth watching as closely as any market report. We've also tracked what the new openings along Woodway and San Felipe say about Tanglewood's food scene, since better trails and more places to eat along the same corridor tend to reinforce each other in a neighborhood like this one.
If you're weighing a move within Tanglewood, or you just want a second opinion on how a project like this affects a specific block or street, Lauren Laigle has been tracking this neighborhood in detail for years. Request a complimentary consultation and home valuation to talk through what's actually changing here, and what isn't.
