Last Night for the I-35 Night Closures Downtown: The Airport Boulevard to 12th Street Paving Work and the SH 71 Flyovers End Thursday
Austin's roughest overnight detour week downtown ends tonight. Thursday is the final night of TxDOT's I-35 lane, ramp and frontage closures between Airport Boulevard and 12th Street — and the final night of the SH 71 flyover closures to southbound I-35.
One more night, then the cones come up. TxDOT's nightly closure set on Interstate 35 between Airport Boulevard and 12th Street runs for the last time tonight, Thursday, Oct. 29, closing a four-night run that began Monday.
The work, as TxDOT Austin announced it: varying nightly lane closures on both directions of I-35 between Airport Boulevard and 12th Street, from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m., for paving. Multiple entrance and exit ramps close with the lanes, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard bridge and both frontage roads carry varying nightly closures of their own. Drivers crossing downtown overnight should expect to be funneled onto the frontage roads and back, with the pattern changing night to night.
The second set ends tonight too. The eastbound and westbound State Highway 71 — Ben White Boulevard — flyovers to southbound I-35 have closed nightly since Monday for bridge column work, and Thursday night is their last scheduled night. TxDOT's announced detour stands for tonight: use Ben White Boulevard itself to reach southbound I-35.
Both sets were announced as Oct. 26-29 work, weather permitting, and neither alert read this run extends them. The Traffic Desk will check Friday's TxDOT alerts for any extension before treating the corridor as clear — but on the schedule TxDOT published, Austin's downtown overnight drivers get their highway back on Friday morning.
