If you walk the Fanno Creek Trail regularly, you probably noticed the orange signs twice this year. Once in June, near Grant Avenue. Again, somewhere around Hall Boulevard, at a point nobody could quite pin down a start date for. It would be reasonable to assume the city was finally getting around to one long-overdue trail upgrade. That assumption would be wrong on both counts, and the distinction actually matters if you use this trail on a regular Sunday-morning or after-work loop.
These are two separate projects, run by two separate agencies, on two different timelines, for two different reasons. Neither one talks to the other in any way a walker would notice. Here's what actually happened, and what it means for how you plan a walk this fall.
The June closure was about ramps, not the trail itself
Back in mid-June, the City of Tigard closed the Fanno Creek Trail between Grant Avenue and Main Street for three days, June 16 through 18. The reason wasn't drainage or paving or anything to do with the creek. The city was installing new ADA ramps along Grant Avenue itself, and the trail happened to run through the work zone. Anyone who needed to get through during those three days had two choices: detour onto Johnson Street, or pick up the Tigard Street Heritage Trail instead, the three-quarter-mile former rail corridor that runs parallel to Tigard Street and feeds into the same downtown network.
That's a short, contained project with a clear before and after. It's also the kind of closure that's easy to miss if you don't walk that exact stretch, which is part of why so many residents lump it together with the second, much less visible project happening at the same time a few blocks away.
The Hall Boulevard project is a completely different agency's problem
The second set of orange signs belongs to the Oregon Department of Transportation, not the city. ODOT has been designing pedestrian crossing improvements at Hall Boulevard, where the Fanno Creek Trail crosses one of the busier state highways running through town. The city's own project page is blunt about why this particular crossing needed attention, noting it has "a history of crashes and near misses related to the trail crossing." Construction was expected to begin in early 2026, and because Hall Boulevard is a state highway, ODOT administers the contract, not Tigard's public works crew.
That single fact, that this is a state-run project layered onto a city-run one, is the part that gets lost. Here's the difference side by side:
| Grant Avenue ADA Ramps | Hall Boulevard Crossing | |
|---|---|---|
| Run by | City of Tigard | Oregon Department of Transportation |
| Closure window | June 16 to 18, 2026 | Construction expected to begin early 2026 |
| What's changing | New wheelchair ramps along Grant Ave | Improved pedestrian signals at the trail crossing |
| Detour | Johnson Street or Tigard Street Heritage Trail | Varies by phase |
If you've been mentally filing both under "the trail construction," it's worth separating them. They'll clear on different schedules, and if you only remember one detour route, it's the Johnson Street and Heritage Trail option from the June project, since that's the one with an actual defined end date.
The trail's real anchor hasn't moved at all
While two agencies work through their separate to-do lists on the trail's edges, the thing that actually organizes a Tigard walker's week hasn't changed: Universal Plaza and the farmers market it hosts are running exactly the way they have for the past several seasons.
The Tigard Farmers Market, which has run since 1993, is open every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. through October 25, 2026, at Universal Plaza on Burnham Street. The market moved to this location a few seasons back, and the plaza itself was built with a boardwalk that curves directly out to the Fanno Creek Trail, so a Sunday walk and a market stop have effectively become the same errand for a lot of people in this neighborhood. No detours, no closures, no agency turf to sort out. Just the same schedule it's kept since spring.
That stability is worth noting precisely because it sits inside a summer of construction noise. The plaza is the one fixed point. The ramps and the crossing signals are temporary friction around it.
Two new stops if you're already walking that direction
None of this year's construction has touched what's actually opened around Tigard while the ramp and crossing work has been underway. Fogo de Chão opened its first Tigard location on February 9, 2026, at Bridgeport Village, its second Oregon location after the original downtown Portland restaurant. The build includes an open churrasco grill visible from the dining room, and the team donated ten percent of the first week's sales to the Oregon Food Bank as part of the opening.
Closer to a casual end-of-walk stop, Mikiko Mochi Donuts opened in Tigard on August 20, 2026, giving the neighborhood a new option for the kind of small, specific errand that pairs naturally with a trail loop, the ten-minute stop that turns a walk into an actual outing instead of just exercise.
Neither of these has anything to do with the trail construction. They're just new additions to a neighborhood where the daily rhythm keeps filling in around whatever the city and the state happen to be digging up that month.
What this actually means if you're planning a fall walk
A few practical takeaways, if you're trying to map out your routine for the next few weeks:
- The Grant Avenue to Main Street closure from June has already cleared. If you avoided that stretch over the summer, it should be walkable again.
- The Hall Boulevard crossing work is state-run and on its own timeline. Watch for signage locally rather than assuming it follows the same schedule as the city's ramp project.
- The farmers market and Universal Plaza are unaffected by either project and are running their normal Sunday hours through October 25.
- If you want a longer loop that avoids construction zones entirely, the Tigard Street Heritage Trail remains a solid detour option, and it deposits you close to the same downtown stretch either way.
The takeaway isn't that Tigard's trail is having a rough year. It's that two agencies are independently patching two different weak points at the same time, and the parts of the neighborhood that actually anchor daily life, the plaza, the market, the new places to eat, are moving on their own schedule entirely, unbothered by either one.
If you're weighing what it's actually like to live near this stretch of Fanno Creek, from the trail access to the Sunday market routine to the new spots filling in around it, Victoria Marchese knows this neighborhood at the level of detail that only comes from working here. Reach out to schedule a free consultation and talk through what life in this part of Tigard actually looks like week to week.
