The Creek Trail Downtown Still Has One Gap, and Knowing Where It Is Changes How You Walk This Fall

If you have tried to walk the length of Waller Creek since the ribbon-cutting in June, you already know the trail does something the press photos didn't show: it stops. Not at the lake, where you'd expect a park to end, but somewhere in the middle of downtown, at a spot that has nothing to do with construction fences and everything to do with a project phase that hasn't started yet.

That gap is worth understanding if you live in Downtown Austin, because the difference between "the creek trail opened" and "the creek trail connects Waterloo Park to Lady Bird Lake" is the difference between a headline and an actual Saturday morning walk.

What finished in June was real, and it was 13 acres

The Confluence, the second phase of Waterloo Greenway's long-running creek project, opened to the public on June 6 after three years of construction. It covers 13 acres along Waller Creek between 4th Street and Lady Bird Lake, built at a cost Waterloo Greenway puts at roughly $91.5 million. Three new lattice bridges now carry pedestrians east to west across the creek, and an 800-foot boardwalk lets trail users skip the awkward street crossings at Red River and Cesar Chavez entirely. Crews planted around 1,600 trees and 200,000 additional plants across the site, land that for decades was the kind of low creek bank that flooded first and worst.

The new trail work links the Lance Armstrong Bikeway, Palm Park, Rainey Street, and the Ann and Roy Butler Hike-and-Bike Trail into roughly a mile of continuous, off-street path. At the 4th Street end, a new entry called the Cypress Grove and Trailhead Plaza connects back into Waterloo Park. At the lake end, the Lakeview Terrace, Leaf Deck, and Lagoon Overlook give you somewhere to actually sit once you've walked it. The whole stretch sits at what Waterloo Greenway calls a cultural crossroads, within a few minutes' walk of the Rainey Street Historic District, the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center, and the Austin Convention Center. In September, the Urban Land Institute's Austin chapter named it Best Public Place in its 2026 Impact Awards.

None of that is in dispute. What's easy to miss is what the project doesn't yet do.

The part that isn't built: Phase III

Waterloo Park, the first phase of this same greenway system, opened back in August 2021 up near the Capitol and UT campus. The Confluence, phase two, opened this June down at the lake. Between those two finished bookends sits Phase III, the stretch of Waller Creek from 4th Street to 12th Street, and as of this writing it exists only as a plan.

Waterloo Greenway held a community meeting in spring 2026 to gather feedback on possible improvements to that middle segment, and the project's own materials describe Phase III as the piece that will eventually complete a continuous, 1.5-mile, universally accessible trail from Waterloo Park down to the Confluence and Lady Bird Lake, bringing the system to a full 35 acres. No construction timeline has been announced. So if you start at the Capitol end and try to walk the whole creek south without a car, you'll run out of finished trail well before you reach the water.

Here's how the three phases actually stack up right now:

If your mental map of "the creek trail" assumed one continuous ribbon from the Capitol to the lake, this is the correction worth making before you plan a walk around it.

The detour nobody put in the headlines

There's a second wrinkle that the June opening coverage didn't dwell on. Starting this past June and running through March 2027, the Ann and Roy Butler Hike-and-Bike Trail is rerouted on the north shore near the Confluence and the Austin Rowing Club building. Austin Energy is using the closure window to install underground electrical infrastructure along the Lady Bird Lake shoreline between Brazos and Trinity streets. The city's own project page asks trail users to slow down through the area and follow on-site staff instructions.

Practically, that means the finished section of the Confluence is real and walkable today, but the loop you might assume you can make along both shores of the lake near the new park isn't fully open on the north side until sometime after March 2027. If you're planning a longer loop rather than an out-and-back, build the detour into your route now rather than discovering it at the rowing club.

Why November might be the best time to actually walk it

The most useful thing happening in this corridor this fall isn't the park itself. It's Creek Show, Waterloo Greenway's light-art event, which has spent every year since its 2014 debut lighting up the upper stretch of Waller Creek near Waterloo Park. This November, for the first time in its history, it moves downstream to the new southern section, running nightly from 6 to 10 p.m. between November 13 and 21, with its main entrance at 4th and Sabine.

Ten light-based installations from local artists will be spread through the newest, least-explored part of the Confluence. One piece reinterprets the story of Moon Tower 15, an original Austin moonlight tower that stood near this site for a century before being relocated with a promised restoration that, more than a decade later, still hasn't happened. Another, called CONTACT, uses illuminated sculptural hands to reference the people once displaced from the creek, inviting visitors to touch them and trigger changes in color and light.

The park photographs well in daylight. It's designed to be walked at night, when the installations are the reason you came.

Creek Show is ticketed, with proceeds going to Waterloo Greenway Conservancy, and it gives residents a structured reason to walk the finished stretch of the Confluence before Phase III eventually stitches the whole creek together. If you already walked this corridor for its restaurant openings this summer, this is the same neighborhood showing you a different half of it after dark.

Downtown Austin has a way of finishing projects in pieces and letting residents figure out the seams themselves. The Confluence is a genuine addition to daily life here, but it rewards knowing exactly where it starts, where it currently ends, and which detour to expect between now and next spring. That kind of granular, block-by-block read on a neighborhood is the same lens Kumara Wilcoxon brings to the properties inside it. If you're weighing what a home in this corridor is actually worth once you understand how it connects to the rest of downtown, that's a conversation worth having before the next phase changes the math again.