Pull up a map of South College Station and University Heights and Jones Crossing look like next-door neighbors. Both sit off Wellborn Road within about two and a half miles of the Texas A&M campus, and the subdivision's own listing materials put the drive to the H-E-B and Chick-fil-A at Jones Crossing at about five minutes. On paper, it reads like a walk. In practice, anyone who has tried it knows the sidewalk gives out before you get there, and you finish the trip on the shoulder.
That gap is not an oversight nobody noticed. It is the predictable result of two separate government projects working on the same road in a different order than most residents would have chosen: the state widened Harvey Mitchell Parkway for cars years before the city started designing sidewalks for people.
The road got faster before it got walkable
Harvey Mitchell Parkway, also known as FM 2818, has been under construction in some form for most of the last decade. The Texas Department of Transportation ran a $47.6 million widening project along 3.2 miles of the corridor, from Raymond Stotzer Parkway down to Wellborn Road, converting the route to what engineers call a "Super Street" design built to improve safety, add capacity, and cut congestion. That work included rebuilding the Holleman Drive and Harvey Mitchell Parkway intersection in phases, the same junction University Heights lists in its own materials as the easy-access route to Harvey Mitchell Parkway and Holleman Drive.
What that widening never included was a continuous sidewalk. The Super Street design solved a car problem. It left the pedestrian problem for someone else to pick up later, and later turned out to be 2026.
In April, the city of College Station held a public open house to unveil a citywide sidewalk and shared-use trail expansion aimed at exactly this kind of gap. City staff described the effort as roughly 60 percent through its design phase, far enough along for residents to see how the projects would run through their own streets but early enough that feedback could still change the layout. One segment identified in that plan runs along Harvey Mitchell Parkway itself and would add more than 3,600 feet of new sidewalk, a single stretch long enough to close a meaningful piece of the walk University Heights residents currently make on the shoulder or not at all.
"That's pretty significant just connecting those areas," said longtime College Station resident Natalie Holladay, who has lived in Aggieland since 1997 and attended the city's sidewalk open house. She added that she appreciated the city seeking input before finalizing anything, saying the goal shared across residents was "making it a great place to live."
As of that April meeting, the city had not announced a construction timeline. The design work is real and specific. The shovels are not in the ground yet.
What's actually waiting at the other end of that gap
The reason this particular sidewalk matters more than a routine infrastructure update is what sits at the far end of it. Jones Crossing, the H-E-B-anchored center at Wellborn Road and Harvey Mitchell Parkway, is not a modest strip center. Leasing data from Brixmor, the firm marketing space there, puts annual visits at an estimated 6.1 million, a volume that ranks the center in the top 1 percent of neighborhood shopping centers in Texas. Wellborn Road itself carries roughly 44,000 vehicles a day past the property.
Stratus Properties built the center starting in September 2017, with the anchor H-E-B opening in September 2018. Since then it has filled in with a specific, recognizable lineup rather than a generic big-box roster. Oishi Sushi signed on as the first location of that restaurant in the Bryan-College Station area. Chick-fil-A, Twin Liquors, Threads Boutique, SuperCuts, and an Orange Theory Fitness studio round out the center, alongside the outdoor patios and small amphitheater that give the place more of a gathering-spot feel than a typical grocery-anchored strip.
For University Heights residents, that means the grocery run, the sushi dinner, and the 6 a.m. workout class are all clustered in one place close enough to see the potential for a walk. The subdivision itself sits on the same side of town, built out with a pool, a dog park, a catch-and-release pond, and volleyball and basketball courts that already give it the feel of a place designed for people who spend time outside. The missing sidewalk is the one piece keeping that outdoor-oriented daily life confined to a car.
What the plan actually covers, and what it doesn't yet answer
The Harvey Mitchell Parkway sidewalk is one piece of a larger set of projects the city outlined at that April open house. Elsewhere in the plan, crews are slated to extend the Bee Creek Tributary B Trail south from Southland Street to Holleman Drive and W.A. Tarrow Park, and to continue the Bee Creek Trail itself from Bee Creek Park along the maintenance shelf toward Harvey Mitchell Parkway. A fourth phase of the Spring Creek Trail is planned to run from behind the SoCo development at Tower Point Apartments to Alexandria Avenue and Southern Oaks Park. City capital projects manager Melissa Thomas said the priority list leans toward school routes, an intentional choice given how many of the identified gaps sit near campuses.
None of that changes the basic math for someone living in University Heights right now. The design phase is advanced. The construction date is not set. Anyone who has made peace with driving to Jones Crossing should keep making peace with it through at least the rest of this year, and probably longer, since municipal sidewalk projects of this scale typically move from finished design to a funded construction schedule over a period of months, not weeks.
What's worth watching is the city's own public input process. The same open house format that produced Holladay's comments in April is likely to repeat as the design finalizes, and residents who want a say in exactly where a new stretch of sidewalk lands, or who want to know when dirt actually moves along Harvey Mitchell Parkway, have a real channel through the city's capital projects office rather than a guessing game.
For now, the honest version of the story is this: the road got built for speed first. The sidewalk is coming, but it is still a design document, not a construction crew. If you live in University Heights and you've been driving that five-minute stretch to Jones Crossing instead of walking it, you're not missing anything. The sidewalk that would make that walk make sense simply isn't finished yet.
If you're weighing a move into University Heights, thinking about renting out a place there, or just want a straight answer on what's changing in this corner of South College Station, the Maurey Bell Group team knows this stretch of Wellborn Road and Harvey Mitchell Parkway as well as anyone in the business. Request a Free Home Valuation & Property Management Quote and we'll walk you through what the neighborhood actually offers today, sidewalks and all.
