Drive Old Jacksonville Highway between Rice Road and Grande Boulevard this week and you'll pass a storefront that didn't exist eight months ago, another that's still wrapped in construction paper, and a third that's supposed to open its doors by the end of this month. For households in The Havens, tucked off Havens Trail in the same south Tyler corridor, this stretch of FM 2493 is part of the regular loop, whether you're grabbing coffee before work or picking up dinner on a Tuesday. It's worth knowing what's actually different about it this year, and what isn't.
Here's the part that surprised even people who track this corridor closely: the businesses are showing up faster than the road can handle them, and the fix that was supposed to catch everything up just slipped to 2030. Not because nobody's paying attention. Because of how Texas funds highway right-of-way, and that mechanism is worth understanding if you plan on living here for a while.
What's Actually New Between Rice Road and the Loop
Likewise Coffee opened its second Tyler location this spring at 7596 Old Jacksonville Highway, Suite 400, expanding out of its original spot in the Mosaic District. The locally owned shop serves coffee, tea, matcha and lemonade, and the new location keeps hours from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday, according to reporting from the Tyler Morning Telegraph. It's the company's sixth restaurant across East Texas, with other sites in Jacksonville and Longview.
A few doors down, HTeaO opened at 5250 Old Jacksonville Highway late last year, run by franchise owners Greg and Tonya Clark as their second Tyler location.
The bigger shift is happening in two spaces that used to be something else entirely. Tikka Shack, a fast-casual Indian concept serving curry bowls, tikka pizzas, naan wraps and kabobs, is taking over the old Cycle Bar space at 5868 Old Jacksonville Highway, Suite 200. Construction was slated to wrap by August 31, which means if you haven't seen it open yet, you're about to.
And down at 5106 Old Bullard Road, in the building that used to be Breakers Seafood, Lalo's Mexican Grill and Cantina held its soft opening in May after years of operating out of a smaller downtown spot. The move gave the family-owned restaurant a full kitchen and dine-in service. The menu kept its known items, the bacon-wrapped hot dogs and asada fries, and added fajitas, steaks, enchiladas and margaritas.
Keep driving south past Gresham and you'll find one more addition worth knowing about, even though it's a bit further down the highway than a typical Havens errand run. Ruby's Mexican Restaurant opened its sixth East Texas location there in June, with a ribbon cutting hosted by the Tyler Metro Chamber of Commerce. It joins a corridor that's already home to established names like Cavender's Home Office, Swann's Furniture Gallery and the Oak Hills Promenade office cluster, so the newcomers are landing in a stretch that was already dense with local business before this year started.
None of this is speculation about what might come. These are open doors, or doors that open within days.
The Overpass That Keeps Slipping a Year at a Time
Now for the part that isn't opening on schedule. TxDOT's plan to widen Old Jacksonville Highway from four lanes to six, with a raised median and a rebuilt overpass at Grande Boulevard, has been on the books for years. Back in 2023, the Tyler Area Metropolitan Planning Organization was still telling residents construction could start in 2026, with a total project cost estimated around $190 million split roughly 80 percent federal and 20 percent state funding.
That timeline didn't hold. By this January, the working start date had already slipped once to 2028, and the MPO used a public meeting to tell residents it was slipping again, this time to 2030. Director Michael Howell confirmed the new date, four years later than what TxDOT was projecting back in 2023. The MPO's April update repeated the 2030 timeline and revised the cost estimate upward to roughly $224 million, an increase Howell attributed to standard design refinement rather than any change in scope.
The traffic numbers explain why this project exists at all. TxDOT counted about 32,000 vehicles a day on this stretch back in 2019, and projects that figure will climb 65 percent to 53,000 vehicles a day by 2045. Every new storefront that opens along the corridor adds driveways, left turns, and cars merging back into traffic, which is exactly the kind of friction TxDOT cites as its own safety rationale for the widening.
Why One Road Project Can Eat Half a District's Budget
The reason for the repeated delays isn't political will or public opposition. It's arithmetic. Howell explained it directly at the January meeting, and it's the kind of detail that doesn't show up unless you're actually sitting in these public sessions.
"It's a part of the TxDOT district budget and they have a specific set amount that goes to the entire district. So any projects that have any widening whatsoever all come out of that one budget, so they are really having to break it up year by year so they can have just enough to allocate it."
TxDOT's Tyler District covers Smith County and seven surrounding counties, all drawing from a single right-of-way acquisition budget. The Old Jacksonville Highway widening is expected to consume roughly half of that entire pool once it moves forward, which means TxDOT can't simply write one check and start buying land. It has to spread the acquisition out over multiple fiscal years, coordinating with property owners and with Oncor to relocate utilities before a single lane can be poured. That's the mechanism behind the delay, and it's also why a third postponement wouldn't be shocking if weather or funding timing shifts again.
What This Means for the Next Few Years
If you live in The Havens, the practical takeaway isn't complicated, but it is useful. The retail and restaurant growth on Old Jacksonville Highway isn't slowing down, and there's no reason to expect it will. New tenants keep finding space in a corridor that's already proven it can support them. What isn't changing anytime soon is the number of lanes those cars are sharing. The overpass at Grande Boulevard, the piece of this project most residents ask about first, is tied to the same 2030 timeline as everything else.
That means the traffic patterns you've already adjusted to, the backups near Grande, the wait to turn left during the evening rush, are likely to be part of daily life here for a few more years rather than a few more months. Planning your errands around off-peak hours, or picking up that Lalo's order on a weeknight rather than a Friday, is a more realistic strategy right now than waiting for extra lanes to fix it.
The corridor is growing. The road underneath it is on a longer clock than most people assumed. Knowing both halves of that story is the difference between being surprised by construction cones in 2030 and already having a plan for getting around them.
For more on what's changing across Tyler and East Texas neighborhoods, from new development to the market shifts that come with it, the Crutcher & Hartley Team has been tracking this region since 1997 and is always glad to talk through what any of it means for your corner of town.
