Mesa Resurfacing, Old Quarry and Other Northwest Hills Updates

For a few days in July, a sign on Mesa Drive announced the street would be closed from the 13th through the 22nd. Then it was quietly swapped for one that said the 13th through the 17th. The Northwest Austin Civic Association relayed what the city had told them: crews were milling and grinding out the old pavement, and the work would run the shorter window.

It is a small thing, a sign correcting itself. It is one small update in a summer of neighborhood projects.

This post follows developments around Far West and Mesa, from street resurfacing to parks and public spaces.

Mesa Drive resurfacing and proposed safety changes

The Mesa Drive redesign between Spicewood Springs Road and Far West Boulevard exists because the pavement was already due. The city said so plainly in its own project materials: routine maintenance scheduled for summer 2026 "provides an opportunity to implement cost-effective safety improvements" alongside the planned resurfacing. Fresh asphalt was going down regardless. The striping is what was up for debate.

What the city proposed, and what residents were asked about in the second round of engagement:

• A one-way buffered bike lane on each side of Mesa
• Limited protective barriers at the start of each block, at pedestrian crossing islands, and around the speed cushions
• Curbside parking consolidated onto the east side of the street
• Rubber speed cushions replaced with asphalt ones

Now set that against the number that explains why Mesa was chosen at all. In the Speed Management Program review cited when the project was announced this spring, this stretch of Mesa ranked 12th out of 878 streets evaluated citywide for speeding and crash risk. Twelfth. Out of eight hundred seventy-eight. The proposed safety changes were presented alongside the scheduled resurfacing.

For daily life, the consequential item on that list is the third one. Consolidating parking onto the east side rewrites a habit for anyone who pulls up along the west curb near the Mesa business cluster, where Another Broken Egg sits at 8012, Goldfish Swim School at 8038, Cordovan Art School and Pottery Parlor at 8108, and St. Matthew's Episcopal Church at 8134. Bike lanes get the attention. Where you leave the car on a Saturday morning is what you will actually notice.

Read the word "limited"

The phase-two survey closed June 28. The first round drew more than 1,000 responses, and the results were not the tidy mandate a redesign usually gets announced with. Speeding was the top concern for nearly 40 percent of respondents. Somewhere between 20 and 25 percent said Mesa Drive did not need improvements at all.

That is a street where roughly one resident in four wanted nothing done at all. And the proposal reads like it. Barriers are not continuous; they are "limited," placed at block starts, crossing islands, and cushions. Parking is consolidated rather than removed. This is a design shaped by the knowledge that a quarter of the neighborhood would have preferred nothing at all, which is a very different document from the one a unanimous street would have produced.

Old Quarry Branch's renovation timeline

Old Quarry offers another project update: it had its own funding from the start and has not yet reopened.

The branch at 7051 Village Center Drive has been closed for 25 months so far. Its renovation timeline has included: asbestos abatement completed in May 2025, site plan revisions for electrical and HVAC, utility permitting, and then a final commissioning review that caught more electrical work. Austin Public Library also pushed back the planned closure of the Menchaca Road Branch so the system would not have two branches dark at once.

What arrives whenever it arrives: a modernized interior layout, an outdoor reading patio, separate learning zones for children and teens, shared learning rooms, upgraded HVAC, and ADA restrooms. Until then, Yarborough and Spicewood Springs are carrying the load.

Bull Creek parks: progress and plans

Bull Creek Bluff Neighborhood Park, 21.39 acres at 6309 Spicewood Springs Road, was acquired by the city in May 2022. In the four years since, the visible progress has been the removal of old concrete slabs and the placement of boulders and mulch to mark temporary parking. The design is still in review, with the project team walking neighbors through the latest layout in a virtual meeting on April 22 of this year. The plan includes a small parking area routed around existing trees, a pavilion, and a rain garden.

Bull Creek District Park at 6701 Lakewood Drive was proposed in 2016; construction began in summer 2023, and a 2024 ribbon cutting marked its completion.

The park itself, meanwhile, keeps doing what it has always done in August. It anchors the Bull Creek Greenbelt, it is a trailhead, and there are wagon tracks still legible in the limestone creek bed from when settlers used it as a road to market.

A two-hour volunteer cleanup at Barrow Nature Preserve

As the Austin Free Press reported, a dozen residents gathered at Barrow Nature Preserve, the wooded ravine near the Bull Creek neighborhood, on May 16 to pull out small-diameter brush and dead material. Austin City Council Member Marc Duchen, who represents the district, was among them. Parks and Recreation ranger Owen Moorhead coached volunteers on what to take and what to leave, since living limbs hold moisture and stay put.

NWACA had asked the city for help with the whole project. Land Management Program Manager Matt McCaw explained that the 2026 budget could not cover it, but it could pay a contractor to haul away what neighbors collected at the end of the cul-de-sac. So neighbors collected it. The cleanup took two hours, start to finish.

The Austin Free Press quoted Parks and Recreation ranger Owen Moorhead: "What we would like is for them to stop being, 'one, one, one, one,' and become a standardized process."

That was Moorhead, describing the ambition for similar efforts at Great Hills Park and Stephenson Nature Preserve. The volunteer cleanup was one way residents took part in local park work.

None of this is accidental. NWACA was formed in 1970, is said to be Austin's first neighborhood association, and covers more than 6,200 single-family households inside Loop 360, US 183, MoPac, and RM 2222. It has been running the Fourth of July parade since 1972, floats lining up on Far West at Waterline. The organizational muscle here is old and it is real, which is precisely why so much gets done through it.

Projects on different timelines

Other projects have their own timelines. The 183 North Mobility Project broke ground in January 2022 and opened its southbound express lanes and MoPac flyover on February 28 of this year, a $612 million build that ran roughly to schedule. It was not designed around Northwest Hills. For local drivers, one practical detail is this: coming off the flyover, exiting right puts you on the side road between MoPac's main lanes and the frontage road, which skips the lights at Steck and Spicewood Springs and lets you rejoin MoPac at the ramp north of Far West.

Roya, chef Amir Hajimaleki's Persian restaurant, opened at 7858 Shoal Creek Boulevard in a repurposed Northwest Austin restaurant space after pop-ups dating back to 2018.

What to do with any of this

For updates on street work, review maintenance schedules alongside project announcements. Mesa Drive shows how scheduled resurfacing can provide an opportunity to consider safety improvements such as crossing islands or striping changes.

And one seasonal note from NWACA's tree committee, since August is when people look at their oaks and reach for the saw: the summer heat does suppress the sap beetles that spread oak wilt, but the trees are already under stress. If pruning did not happen by now, fall is the better call.

When you are ready to think about what any of this means for your own address, the team at The Drewett Group knows these blocks street by street. Reach out to request access to private listings.