For most of Campo Del Sol's short life, McCombs Street has done exactly one job: get cars off US-54 and into the neighborhood. Two lanes, a frontage road, a stoplight cycle that backs up during the school and shift-change rush. TxDOT's own project paperwork for this stretch doesn't dress that up. The agency describes the corridor plainly as one dealing with rapid growth and increased traffic, which is a bureaucratic way of saying what anyone merging onto US-54 from McCombs at 7:40 in the morning already knows.
What's less known, because it's buried in engineering documents rather than posted at the entrance gate, is what TxDOT is actually building to fix it. The project isn't just more pavement. It includes a new overpass, a fully reconfigured interchange, and something Campo Del Sol doesn't have anywhere else along its edge: a continuous path built for walking and biking, not driving.
What TxDOT Is Actually Replacing
The project has a name that sounds bigger than a stretch of frontage road deserves: US 54 (Patriot Freeway) Improvements, Kenworthy Street to McCombs Street. The scope covers roughly 2.3 miles of the corridor, running from just north of Kenworthy to just north of McCombs, which puts Campo Del Sol's front door at the northern end of the build.
The plan extends the existing mainlanes into a four-lane divided roadway, with the current three-lane arterials converted into frontage roads connected by new ramps. That's the piece that matters most for the daily commute: US-54 stops being a single shared surface where local and through traffic fight for the same lanes, and becomes two separate systems that happen to run next to each other.
The centerpiece is a new overpass at Sean Haggerty Drive and McCombs Street, which grade-separates the intersection that currently forces everything, including cross traffic, through one signal. TxDOT's cost estimates for the work have moved depending on which document you're reading, ranging from just over $51 million in one district summary to roughly $80 million in the project fact sheet that lays out full construction scope, which is normal for a project still working through design refinement rather than a sign anything is wrong.
Here's the before-and-after in TxDOT's own terms:
| Today | After the project | |
|---|---|---|
| Mainlanes | Shared 3-lane arterial | 4-lane divided highway |
| McCombs/Sean Haggerty intersection | At-grade signal | Grade-separated overpass |
| Pedestrian and bike access | None dedicated | Continuous shared-use path, Kenworthy to McCombs |
| Frontage | Mixed with through traffic | Separate frontage roads with connecting ramps |
Why Nothing Looks Different Yet
If you've been watching McCombs for visible construction and seeing mostly the same road, that's not a stalled project. It's a project moving through the stages that happen before the ground gets torn up.
TxDOT opened public comment on the plan in June 2024, notifying property owners along the corridor as part of the environmental review. By the time the district published its most recent priority projects summary, the environmental status had shifted to cleared, the milestone that has to happen before a construction contract can be bid. That same summary put the target letting date, the point when TxDOT opens the project to contractors and awards the work, at June 2026.
That date has already passed. TxDOT's public documents don't confirm whether the bid actually went out on schedule, which means the honest read right now is that the corridor sits at or just past the point where a construction contract should exist. The heavier work that follows a letting, lane shifts, utility relocation, the actual overpass construction, hasn't shown up in any published update since, but nothing in the project's own timeline suggests it's still years off either.
In practical terms: if McCombs still looks the same as it did a year ago, that's not evidence the project stalled. It's evidence that the gap between an awarded contract and visible mobilization can run longer than the paperwork implies.
The Part That Isn't About Driving at All
Buried in the project's goals, alongside the lanes and the overpass, is a line that's easy to skim past: continuous shared-use paths from Kenworthy Street to McCombs Street, for pedestrian accommodation.
Right now, getting anywhere along US-54 on foot or by bike means using whatever shoulder or frontage strip happens to be available, competing with the same traffic the mainlane expansion is trying to separate from local access. A dedicated path running the length of the project changes that calculus specifically for the stretch that borders Campo Del Sol's own trail network, the one connecting the community's amenity center, its village parks, and its pocket green spaces.
Campo Del Sol was built with that kind of connectivity in mind from the start. The neighborhood's amenity hub, a 4.5-acre complex anchored by a lazy river at 51001 Preston Foster Boulevard, opened with a ribbon-cutting in October 2024 alongside miles of internal hike-and-bike trail. The community sits directly against Franklin Mountains State Park, which the developer's own materials describe as offering trailhead access without leaving the neighborhood. A shared-use path along McCombs doesn't replace any of that. It extends it, giving residents near the highway frontage a way to reach those trailheads and the amenity center without merging onto a road built for cars.
The Corridor Was Always Going to Get This Attention
None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who was paying attention when Campo Del Sol broke ground. Ryan Burkhardt, president of Scarborough Lane Development and Franklin Mountain Communities, told El Paso Inc. back when the first phase was rising that there was no retail along McCombs yet, but that would change because "retail follows rooftops." He also said at the time that McCombs itself would eventually become a six-lane TxDOT road as the community filled in.
That's exactly the pattern playing out now, just one project ahead of full build-out. The 2,200 acres and roughly 9,100 planned units that Paul Foster announced at that same event were always going to generate enough daily trips to justify rebuilding the highway that serves them. The commercial land along McCombs that Burkhardt described as being marketed but undeveloped is the same land TxDOT is now designing around, and the overpass at Sean Haggerty is effectively future-proofing for the retail corridor the community was designed to support.
For anyone commuting to Fort Bliss, which sits close enough that military families moving into this part of Northeast El Paso typically count on a 15 to 25 minute drive via US-54, the mainlane separation is the piece that most directly shortens that trip once it's finished. Right now, that commute shares lane space with everyone getting on and off at McCombs for the schools, the Hospitals of Providence Northeast Campus, Crunch Fitness, and the retail along Dyer Street. Once through traffic and local traffic split onto separate roadways, that daily merge stops being the bottleneck it is today.
What to Watch For
The project's own paperwork never published a construction start date, only that June 2026 letting target, and no public update since has confirmed what happened at the bid table. That means the next visible sign something is changing on McCombs won't be an announcement. It will be barricades, detour signage, and the kind of utility relocation work TxDOT has already flagged as expected along this stretch. With the letting target already behind us, that phase is closer than it would have looked a year ago, so residents watching the corridor should expect it sooner rather than later.
The version of McCombs that exists after this project finishes looks meaningfully different from the one Campo Del Sol residents drive today: a divided highway instead of a shared arterial, a grade-separated crossing instead of a backed-up signal, and a paved path connecting the neighborhood's own trail system to the wider corridor. None of that shows up in a listing description or a community brochure. It shows up in how long the drive to Fort Bliss takes and whether a bike ride to the amenity center means sharing space with highway traffic or not.
If you're weighing what a corridor project like this means for a specific address in Campo Del Sol, whether it's proximity to the coming overpass, access to the new shared-use path, or how the timeline lines up with your own plans, the team at Cornerstone Realty tracks these projects alongside the market data, and can walk you through what it means for the property you're watching.
