A commercial building at 5500 Franklin Avenue is currently on the market for $1.4 million, and the listing leans hard on one selling point: high visibility, easy access for customers and deliveries. A few blocks away, a half-acre corner lot at 2020 Franklin cites a 2020 TxDOT count of over 15,000 vehicles a day as its core value proposition. Both are reasonable pitches. Both are also describing a road that TxDOT has already approved for a redesign that will change how vehicles reach that frontage.
That's the piece missing from most conversations about buying or leasing along this stretch of the Highway 6 Corridor. Franklin Avenue, officially Spur 298, runs from where it splits with Highway 84 out to Valley Mills Drive, and it's set for a $44.7 million reconstruction that consolidates driveways, turns the current service roads into main travel lanes, and converts most of today's main lanes into a median. Bids are expected late in 2026, with construction starting in early 2027 and running an estimated 12 to 15 months. If you're underwriting a Franklin Avenue property based on the access it offers today, you're underwriting an asset that's scheduled to change before your next lease renewal.
What the project actually rebuilds
TxDOT's plan for this segment isn't cosmetic. According to project details reported by the Waco Tribune-Herald, most of the corridor's current main lanes will be rebuilt into an overpass carrying through traffic over New Road, while the rest of today's main lanes get converted into median once new travel lanes are complete. The existing service roads, the ones many businesses currently use for direct driveway access, become the new main lanes.
The consolidation piece is the part owners and buyers tend to miss. TxDOT spokesperson Jake Smith told the Tribune-Herald that business driveway access in some places will be consolidated to meet current state design standards. That's a polite way of saying some curb cuts that exist today won't exist after the project closes out.
The scope, in short:
- Reconstructing and realigning travel lanes along Spur 298 from the Highway 84 split to Valley Mills Drive (SL 396)
- Building an overpass and ramps at New Road so through traffic bypasses the current signal
- Consolidating driveways to reduce the number of conflict points along the corridor
- Adding continuous sidewalks through the project limits
- Funding through the Waco MPO's locally controlled allocation of state transportation dollars, budgeted at $44.7 million, up from an original $36.5 million estimate as material and labor costs climbed
That last point matters for anyone reading construction budgets as a proxy for how settled a project is. An eight-million-dollar upward revision on a corridor project this size usually means the design has moved past the conceptual stage and into something contractors are actually pricing. This isn't a proposal sitting in a drawer. It's funded and scheduled.
The business owner already living with the disruption
Brian Schroeder owns Waco Motor Sports on Franklin, and he's on record with local news describing what the current intersection layout costs his business in a different currency: safety. He told KXXV that the corridor sees roughly one serious accident a month, some resulting in fatalities, largely because of the tightly spaced crossings TxDOT is designing out.
Schroeder isn't rooting against the project. He wants the congestion relief the overpass promises during peak hours, which he described as thick between 8 and 9 in the morning and again from 5 to 7 in the evening. But he was equally direct about the tradeoff: the construction period itself will hurt his business's visibility before it helps his customers' commute.
That's the honest version of what every frontage owner on this stretch is signing up for. A safer, faster corridor is coming. So is a multi-year window where the thing you're paying a premium for today, direct visibility and unimpeded access from a public road, gets rebuilt out from under the property.
Reading the frontage pitch against the actual timeline
Go back to those two listings. The 5500 Franklin property, a 15,000-square-foot tilt-wall building on M-2 zoning, markets itself on visibility and ease of access for customers, staff, and deliveries. The 2020 Franklin corner lot leans on a 2020 traffic count of over 15,000 vehicles per day.
Neither claim is false. Both describe the corridor as it exists in August 2026. Neither accounts for what changes once TxDOT lets the contract, which the current timeline puts at late 2026, with construction running into 2027 and 2028.
A buyer comparing this to a similar frontage parcel elsewhere in Waco, one not sitting inside an active TxDOT reconstruction footprint, is not comparing like assets. The Franklin Avenue parcel carries construction-period access risk that a stabilized corridor doesn't. It may also carry long-term upside once the overpass opens and the corridor's crash pattern improves, but that upside sits on the other side of a 12-to-15-month build window that starts with the exact driveway consolidation work that determines whether your specific curb cut survives the redesign.
The question worth asking before you sign anything on this stretch isn't "what's the current traffic count." It's "where does my parcel's access point fall relative to the driveways TxDOT plans to close, and has anyone confirmed that against the actual project schematics." That's a document you can request from TxDOT's Spur 298 project page, and it's worth doing before the traffic count on a marketing flyer becomes the only number you've underwritten against.
What this means depending on where you sit
If you're a business owner considering a Franklin Avenue location: the corridor's traffic volume is real and durable. The specific access point you'd use to reach a given building may not be. Confirm driveway status against TxDOT's current schematics before you commit to a lease or purchase, not after.
If you own frontage property here already: the construction window is a real cost, not a hypothetical one. Schroeder's read on visibility loss during construction is the experience of someone already living a few hundred feet from where this work starts. Price that disruption into any near-term listing or lease-renewal conversation rather than treating today's traffic count as a stable input.
If you're evaluating this corridor against other Highway 6 Corridor parcels: understand that Franklin Avenue's Spur 298 segment sits on a different construction clock than the Highway 6 Twin Bridges work over Lake Waco, which is a separate project running on its own multi-year timeline. Franklin's overpass and driveway consolidation is its own event, funded and scheduled independently, and it deserves its own underwriting rather than getting folded into a general sense that the corridor is under construction.
FAQ
When does construction actually start on Franklin Avenue? TxDOT's current timeline has the bidding process opening in late 2026, with construction beginning in early 2027 and running an estimated 12 to 15 months.
Will my specific driveway be affected? That depends on where your parcel sits relative to the intersections TxDOT plans to close and the sections of main lane converting to median. The project's design documents through TxDOT's Waco district are the source to check, not a general sense of the corridor's traffic pattern.
Is this the same project as the Highway 6 Twin Bridges rebuild? No. The Twin Bridges project rebuilds the Highway 6 crossing over Lake Waco on its own multi-year schedule. The Franklin Avenue work covers Spur 298 from the Highway 84 split to Valley Mills Drive and is funded separately through the Waco MPO's state transportation allocation.
Does the project affect the Highway 6 and Highway 84 interchange too? A related interchange overhaul involving flyovers at Highway 6 and Highway 84 has been discussed since 2022, but that work is now tracked as a separate roughly $215 million project and isn't expected to go out for construction bids until sometime between 2030 and 2035.
If you own, lease, or are underwriting a purchase along this stretch of Franklin Avenue or anywhere else in the Highway 6 Corridor, the access assumptions baked into a listing's marketing language deserve a second look before they become the basis for an offer. Kelly Commercial can walk the specific parcel, the specific driveway status, and the specific timeline with you. Let's Get Started.
