Harris County plans 4.25-mile sidewalk project along South Mason Road

Harris County Precinct 4 is set to build 4.25 miles of sidewalk along South Mason Road, stretching from Kingsland Boulevard to the Fort Bend County line, in a push officials say will make west Harris County safer for residents, students and nearby businesses.

Construction is expected to begin in June and finish about a month later. That makes the project one of the more immediate changes coming to a corridor where pedestrian space has been limited and where county leaders have tied the work to multiple safety incidents.

The new sidewalk segment is part of Commissioner Lesley Briones’ Sidewalks 4 Precinct 4 program, which launched in March 2024 in Alief Independent School District. Precinct 4 says the effort is built on a data-driven gap analysis that identified sidewalk gaps across 406 square miles and ranked locations within one mile of schools, parks, bus stops and healthcare providers. The program says it is meant to connect families to schools, parks, hospitals, transit stops, places of worship and shopping centers.

The county says the sidewalk effort has already moved quickly by infrastructure standards. Precinct 4 says it completed its first 50 miles of sidewalks within about one year, and it has set aside $20 million for 2024-2025 and $16 million for 2025-2026 to keep the program moving. County officials say that approach combines planning, design and construction in a way that can shorten the years-long timelines common in sidewalk work elsewhere.

Along South Mason Road, the practical test will be whether the new concrete changes daily routines in places like Cinco Ranch and the surrounding Katy area. A corridor that carries school traffic, neighborhood traffic and business traffic at the same time has little room for people walking along its edge now. County leaders are betting that a continuous sidewalk will give students, workers and residents a safer route between homes, bus stops and commercial centers, instead of leaving them to navigate alongside fast-moving vehicles.

The South Mason project also follows a recent disruption nearby. In April 2026, Westheimer Parkway and South Mason Road in Cinco Ranch reopened after about six weeks of repairs tied to a sinkhole and a collapsed wastewater pipe, a reminder that the corridor’s basic infrastructure has been under strain. For Precinct 4, the sidewalk build is a small piece of concrete work with a larger point: west Harris County is still catching up to the way people actually move through it.