The construction between League City and Dickinson is part of a larger project that will eventually widen I-45 all the way to Galveston. That work is happening between FM 517 and FM 518. The freeway is being widened from six lanes to eight.
TxDOT’s Danny Perez admits it’s a pretty tight squeeze right now as they funnel traffic through the construction zone. So at certain points during the project they’ll have to totally close the freeway.
“We try not to do large closures during the day,” explained Perez. “A lot of that work will be done, when we need to close lanes, at night or on the weekend.”
And when they do shut down the main lanes, Perez said they’ll detour traffic to the frontage road.
“When we do have the larger closures we’re doing one side as opposed to both sides,” said Perez. “We’ll do one side maybe at one point and then we’ll switch over to the other side.”
TxDOT said the work is needed because of the region’s growing population and to support hurricane evacuation. They expect to finish in 2021.