A truck travels beside a bike lane on Hemphill Street in Fort Worth on July 16, 2026.
Elvis Martinez-Cartagena
FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM
Fort Worth’s Hemphill Street — one of the city’s main traffic corridors on the south side — has a long history.
At a meeting at the Victory Forest Community Center on Wednesday, Aug. 26, staff with the city’s Transportation and Public Works Department announced that six years after the city introduced a bike-friendly infrastructure, drivers will once again have five lanes on much of the thoroughfare.
The street maintenance project that Fort Worth undertook in 2020 has become larger than itself. Here’s what to know, and what comes next, for Hemphill Street:
‘Block after block of comfortable cottages’
In the 1940s, the widening of Hemphill Street between Magnolia Street and Biddison Street was a big enough deal that a ceremony attracted throngs of people.
“Block after block of comfortable cottages, numerous stately homes, and a wealth of shrubbery, trees and landscaping line either side of the newly improved section on Hemphill Street as well as the previously widened area on south,” a Star-Telegram reporter wrote at the time.
These days there are fewer stately homes and more strip malls. Past its glory days, the street adopted a grimier reputation, with crime and dangerous drivers, but there was a vision to transform it into something resembling Magnolia Street, or one of south Fort Worth’s pedestrian havens.
In 2020, Fort Worth restriped Hemphill Street from Hammond Street to Vickery Boulevard, narrowing it from five lanes to three, and adding bike lanes, bus pull-outs and street parking.
The restriping and new infrastructure, advocacy groups and neighborhood associations hoped, could encourage business growth and make the street safer for the nearby schools, community centers and churches. Slower drivers, urban planners theorize, can encourage economic growth in addition to keeping streets safer.
“I could see the vision,” said Rosemary Galdiano, a Worth Heights resident and member of the neighborhood association. “I could see what it was when I was a kid, and how I used to walk Hemphill all the way to the Berry Street theater … it was just a different life, a different world, and it felt calmer.”
A cyclist rides on a bike lane on Hemphill Street in Fort Worth July 16, 2026. Elvis Martinez-Cartagena FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM A new vision — but the same problems persist
In April, the city shared the findings of a traffic study that revealed what many residents and community leaders in the Hemphill corridor’s neighborhoods knew to be true.
The new infrastructure had led to a decline in car crashes and pedestrian deaths, but traffic congestion continued to worsen.
According to the city’s traffic study, which was presented during an April meeting attended by dozens of residents, the number of cars driving on portions of Hemphill is expected to increase from roughly 13,000 to over 23,000 by 2045.
Hemphill was due for a restriping anyway, Fort Worth officials told residents — should it return to its days of five-lane freedom?
A bike lane sign stands on Hemphill Street in Fort Worth on July 16, 2026. Elvis Martinez-Cartagena FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM Hemphill’s next steps
The city presented three options:
Leave Hemphill Street as is, with three lanes and the extra infrastructure.Return the street to five lanes south of Allen Avenue.Do away with the new infrastructure all the way down Hemphill, save for a section between Rosedale Street and Allen Avenue that would be reduced to four lanes.
For Galdiano, doing away with the infrastructure completely was a worst-case scenario.
“I think Fort Worth likes to build itself as a large city with a small town feel,” Galdiano said in an interview ahead of the meeting. “But if you’re putting a highway through it, through the neighborhood, the urban core, it’s not very ‘small town.’ It’s not ‘small town’ at all, and it’s not safe. And we really need to create spaces where the community can gather.”
The question has almost become a kind of identity crisis for the corridor. Some with urban planning backgrounds believe that keeping the infrastructure in place will keep the neighborhood much safer.
“In my experience — I go there on a regular basis,” said Ann Zadeh, a former City Council member and an advocate for the pedestrian infrastructure. “It has calmed traffic and made it safer for folks that have to traverse the street in other ways besides driving through quickly. If there is a complaint to be had, it was that that corridor didn’t get the three-dimensional full-blown infrastructure that one would need in order for it to be more completely successful.”
Some, like Carter Park resident David Martinez, think that adding the pedestrian and bike infrastructure was a political move without the interests of the community in mind.
“The people that want the bike lanes, none of them ride their bikes on Hemphill in the south side,” Martinez said. “We’re seeing this is being done because of people who are trying to develop the neighborhood.”
City chooses hybrid option
Results from the city’s survey, which were shared at the Aug. 26 meeting, revealed that over half of the people who responded wanted the full return of Hemphill’s five lanes. 15% wanted to keep the existing configuration from the street.
Representatives from Fort Worth’s Transportation and Public Works department told a sparse crowd that the hybrid option — returning the street to five lanes south of Allen — was the department’s ultimate recommendation.
The project, which will cost between $700,000 and $800,000 according to traffic engineer Rajnish Gupta, will be completed before April 2027.
The announcement brought some disappointment from people in the crowd like Richard Riccetti, a committee chair for the Hemphill Corridor Task Force who was a strong advocate for the original restriping project.
“People drive crazy, so if we are going to be shifting back to five lanes south of Allen, there’s still a couple of issues,” Riccetti told city staff at the August meeting.
Riccetti also argued that congestion caused by trains was a major factor in Hemphill traffic, and said that driver speeds along Hemphill are just too fast.
After the meeting, Riccetti said that he believed that ‘hardscaping’ — the addition of trees and medians that can help direct traffic and keep speeds down — would be a better solution.
“That’s what could help economic development, safety, and traffic flow for everyone,” Riccetti said. “It’s just a matter of if the city’s going to have bond money to do that.”
Fort Worth City Council member Jeanette Martinez said that many residents in her district, which encompasses a large portion of Hemphill Street, are not interested in becoming a Magnolia Street-type neighborhood — and agreed that it would take more than street striping to make Hemphill safer.
“I do want to see improvements on Hemphill,” Martinez said. “I believe those need to be safety improvements, but we don’t have the funding for that.”
City council member Elizabeth Beck, whose district also includes portions of Hemphill, said that the responses from the community reflected that what makes sense in urban planning may not always fit the neighborhood’s desires.
“I hear the urban planning argument for it, but I also feel like we have to be context-sensitive, and what’s good in a case study isn’t always what’s right for a neighborhood,” Beck said.
In a statement on Thursday, Aug. 27, Near Southside Inc. — an organization dedicated to Fort Worth’s Near Southside neighborhood — supported the existing orientation of Hemphill.
“Near Southside, Inc. believes that preserving the current configuration is the best outcome for our district,” the organization’s president Megan Henderson wrote.
Because the restriping is a maintenance project and not a capital investment project, Beck said, it will not require council approval unless the restriping work itself is contracted out to a company for over $100,000.
In a statement on Thursday, Aug. 27, Gupta — the traffic engineer — said the city took residents’ concerns to heart.
“Our goal has been to listen to the residents and businesses with their concerns, look carefully at the data and find the best balance between mobility, safety and different ways people use Hemphill,” said Rajnish Gupta, Traffic Engineer.
Once the design of the new layout is complete, a spokesperson for the transportation department said, crews will begin taking out the current striping before laying out the new lane configurations.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Emily Holshouser is a local news reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.