On the afternoon of April 17, Washington County Commissioners Pam Treece, Jason Snider, and Nafisa Fai stood at the edge of a freshly paved multiuse path on Springville Road and cut a ribbon. The project behind them had taken four separate construction phases to finish. Treece called it "a fully transformed multi-modal corridor that will serve this community for decades to come." She added that the yearslong effort was "an example of a community investing in itself."
If you live in North Bethany, you already know what those years felt like from the inside: lane shifts, flaggers, detour signs pointing you toward 185th Avenue or Bethany Boulevard when you just wanted to get to Fred Meyer. The corridor between 185th Avenue and Kaiser Road is genuinely done now, and it changed the street in ways worth knowing if you walk, bike, or drive it regularly. But the finish line on Springville Road turns out to be the starting line for the next project over, and that project is routing its own detour traffic straight back through the road you just watched get finished.
Four Phases, One Corridor
Springville Road's rebuild ran in stages dating back to a pedestrian crossing installed at 173rd Avenue in 2017, through three more construction phases that widened the road, added a center turn lane, and rebuilt the shoulders on both sides. The final piece, Phase 4 between Joss Avenue and the Portland Community College Rock Creek campus, broke ground in July 2024 and wrapped its main construction by December 2025, with cleanup work finishing in April 2026, just in time for the ribbon cutting.
Almost all of it was paid for through the North Bethany County Service District for Roads, a funding mechanism set up specifically to speed up transportation projects in this fast-growing unincorporated area ahead of what the county's regular budget cycle would have allowed. That's the practical reason a project like this could move through four phases in a stretch of years rather than getting stuck on a countywide waiting list.
What actually changed on the ground:
- New traffic signals at Springville's intersections with 185th Avenue and Joss Avenue, replacing what used to be uncontrolled or stop-sign crossings
- Continuous buffered bike lanes and sidewalks on both sides of the street for the full stretch between 185th and Kaiser Road
- A dedicated center turn lane and improved sight distances along the curves near PCC Rock Creek
- Two stream culverts replaced, one east of the PCC entrance and one between Samuel Drive and Joss Avenue, both upgraded to let fish and small animals pass beneath the road
- New stormwater treatment facilities to slow and clean runoff before it reaches Rock Creek
As the Valley Times reported, a county Land Use and Transportation official described Springville as "an important connection point for thousands of people every day." That's not an exaggeration for anyone who uses it to get to the PCC campus, to Bethany Village, or simply across the neighborhood on a bike.
Where the New Path Actually Takes You
The multiuse path itself isn't just a wider sidewalk. It ties directly into the Rock Creek Trail, a paved, flat path that follows Springville and Rock creeks toward the Tualatin River. The Bethany segment runs about 3.5 miles from the Rock Creek Powerline and Soccer Fields to Kaiser Woods Natural Area, and it connects to a separate 2-mile segment in Hillsboro by way of about three quarters of a mile on neighborhood streets. The trail is ADA accessible and stroller-friendly, with marked crossings at the busier streets and non-skid strips on the bridges, and it passes through wetlands, meadows, and forest where wildlife viewing is part of the draw, not an afterthought.
That matters for the Springville project specifically because the new multiuse path was built to link neighborhoods, the PCC Rock Creek campus, and community hubs into that broader trail network, rather than functioning as an isolated stretch of sidewalk. If you've been driving to the trailhead near Kaiser Woods because the walk or ride there felt disconnected or unsafe along the old two-lane version of Springville, that's the specific problem this project addressed. The county's own language calls this "a continuous network of sidewalks, bike lanes, upgraded intersections, safer crossings" linking residents to schools, recreation, transit, and services, and for the first time since the project began, that description matches the pavement.
The Detour Signs Didn't Retire, They Moved
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only read the ribbon-cutting headlines. Springville Road's finish coincides almost exactly with the start of construction one intersection over, on Kaiser Road between Springville and Brugger Road. Design work on that project wrapped in fall 2025, and construction began in May 2026. As of a county update in late May, crews were already underway, with lane closures adding delays of up to ten minutes at a time. A full road closure ran from June 16 through August 16 this year, and the official detour route sent drivers to Germantown Road, 185th Avenue, and Springville Road itself.
That's the twist worth sitting with if you live in this part of North Bethany. The road that spent years absorbing detour traffic from its own construction is now serving as someone else's detour route while its neighbor gets rebuilt. The Kaiser Road project isn't expected to wrap until September 2027, which means Springville Road, technically finished, is going to see more through traffic over the next year than it would if both projects had simply been left alone.
The Kaiser Road work itself mirrors what just happened on Springville: a center turn lane, on-street bike lanes, and standard sidewalks between Springville and Brugger, plus a new sidewalk along county property near the Kaiser and Brugger intersection. The county is also evaluating whether that intersection needs an enhanced crosswalk once construction wraps. It's the same playbook, just one street over, and it's funded through the same kind of phased, patience-testing timeline that took Springville from 2017 to 2026.
What This Means Through Next Fall
If your daily route touches Kaiser Road between Springville and Brugger, expect the lane closures and occasional short delays to continue into next year, with the county's own timeline pointing to a September 2027 finish. If you'd normally cut through on Germantown Road or 185th Avenue to avoid a slow stretch, those are the same streets currently absorbing Kaiser Road's detour traffic, so they may run a little heavier than usual through the construction window.
The upside is that Springville Road itself, the road you've probably been avoiding at certain hours for years, is now the smoothest way to get between 185th Avenue and Kaiser Road on foot, bike, or in a car. The signals at 185th and Joss give pedestrians and cyclists a real crossing where there wasn't one before, and the multiuse path finally makes the ride out to Kaiser Woods Natural Area and the Rock Creek Trail feel like part of the neighborhood instead of a workaround.
Waiting for a road to feel finished can take patience. It's a fair trade if the payoff is a corridor that actually connects to where people are already trying to go, even if the orange signs just moved next door for another year.
If you've got questions about how road projects like this one affect a specific block or property in Bethany, Henry Liu - Main Site knows this corridor well enough to walk you through it. Let's Connect.
