Pull up a map of Cedar Park's parks and trails and it reads like one long green ribbon: Twin Lakes Park, over to Lakeline Park, down through Brushy Creek Sports Park, out to the lake, into Round Rock. Forty-seven parks, just over 1,000 acres, 31 miles of trails, all humming together. Try to actually walk it that way this month and you will hit two hard stops that the map does not show. One is temporary. The other has a completion date more than a year out.
If you live near Whitestone Boulevard, Bell Boulevard, or the YMCA campus off Little Elm Trail, both of those stops shape your actual weekend right now, not in some future phase of city planning.
The trail that already works
The core of the system is the Brushy Creek Regional Trail, and it is genuinely one continuous route. It starts at Twin Lakes Park, at 204 E Little Elm Trail, which also happens to be home to the Twin Lakes Family YMCA. From there the trail runs east under the 183A toll road, through wooded stretches for about a mile and a half, and under a wooden railroad bridge dating back to the 1880s that once carried granite to the state capitol in Austin.
Keep going and you cross under West Parmer Lane into Brushy Creek Lake Park, 90 acres with a lake, a fishing pier, kayak access, and sand volleyball and bocce courts. From there it is another mile and a half to Champion Park, where kids dig for fossil casts in a sand play area shaped like dinosaur bones, before the trail continues into Round Rock, eventually crossing under an active rail corridor that carries Amtrak's Texas Eagle between Chicago, San Antonio, and Los Angeles. Depending on where you start counting, that stretch runs somewhere between 6.5 and 7.75 miles of connected, rideable trail.
That part of the system is not the problem. The problem is what it does not touch.
Two networks, still not one
Lakeline Park opened in March 2023 with its own four miles of paved trail, a playground, ten acres of athletic fields, and a lake of its own. It sits close to the Brushy Creek corridor on the map. It is not connected to it on the ground. If you park at Lakeline Park and want to reach the Twin Lakes YMCA trailhead or the Regional Trail on foot, you currently have to leave the trail system and use the street.
That gap is exactly what the city's newly approved Lakeline Park Master Plan Phase 2 is meant to close. Cedar Park officials approved the plan on April 23, 2026, and it centers on a pedestrian bridge over Bell Boulevard that will physically link Lakeline Park to the Twin Lakes Family YMCA campus and the Brushy Creek Regional Trail. That bridge is scheduled for completion by the end of 2027, not this year or next spring.
The pedestrian bridge over Bell Boulevard is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2027, according to Cedar Park's approved Phase 2 plan for Lakeline Park.
Phase 2 also adds new trails through what the plan calls the Western Woodlands, an elevated canopy walk with outlooks over the creek and lake, and more parking and restrooms at Lakeline Park itself. The design firm SWA Group is handling the master plan, and Parks and Recreation Director Mike DeVito has said staff will bring a design contract to City Council at a future date, meaning the detailed engineering has not started yet. Funding traces back to a bond program Cedar Park voters approved in 2022, which included design money for this exact phase. This has been years in motion. It is just not finished.
The gap that isn't in the plan yet, either
There is a third piece, separate from Lakeline Park, that will eventually stitch the north side of the city into this same network: the Brushy Creek North Fork Trail. It is planned as a new eight to ten foot wide concrete shared-use path running about three miles, starting near the intersection of West Parmer Lane and East Whitestone Boulevard and heading south to meet the Regional Trail near Brushy Creek Road. The idea has been on the books since Cedar Park's 2010 Hike and Bike Trails Master Plan, gained momentum through a recommendation from the Parks Art Community Enrichment Board's Hike and Bike Subcommittee, and was submitted to the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization's call for projects in 2017, where it was selected for funding.
Right now, that corridor is not just unfinished. It is actively disrupted. As of a road work alert the city posted for Wednesday, July 22, 2026, the Brushy Creek North Fork Trail is detoured at the Brushy Creek bridge because of construction tied to the Toro Grande Roadway Improvements Project. If your usual loop runs through that stretch, plan on a detour until the city posts an update.
| Trail Segment | Length | Status This Summer | What It Connects |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brushy Creek Regional Trail | Roughly 6.5 to 7.75 miles | Open, continuous | Twin Lakes Park/YMCA east through Brushy Creek Sports Park, Brushy Creek Lake Park, and Champion Park into Round Rock |
| Lakeline Park's internal trail loop | 4 miles (Phase 1) | Open, but a separate loop | Circles the park's playground, athletic fields, and lake; not linked to the Regional Trail on the ground |
| Brushy Creek North Fork Trail | About 3 miles planned | Under construction, currently detoured at the Brushy Creek bridge | Will eventually run from West Parmer Lane/East Whitestone Boulevard south to the Regional Trail near Brushy Creek Road |
| Bell Boulevard pedestrian bridge | Roughly 1 mile approach | In design phase, no construction start date announced | Will join Lakeline Park to the Twin Lakes YMCA campus and the Regional Trail, targeted for completion by the end of 2027 |
The route that actually works this week
None of this means the trail system is unusable. It means the useful loop right now is narrower than the map suggests. Park at Twin Lakes Park or the YMCA, and you have a real, continuous route: about 2.25 miles east to Brushy Creek Sports Park, where there is a skate park, disc golf, and ball fields, then another stretch to Brushy Creek Lake Park for the splash pad and kayak rentals, then on to Champion Park. That whole corridor is open, connected, and not affected by the Toro Grande detour, since that construction sits on the separate North Fork alignment north of Whitestone.
If your starting point is Lakeline Park itself, treat it as its own four-mile loop for now rather than a gateway to the regional system. That is not a downgrade. It is just an accurate read of what is on the ground today, which matters more than what a map legend implies.
What changes, and when
Two dates are worth keeping in mind if you use these trails regularly. The first is whenever the city clears the Toro Grande-related detour on the North Fork Trail, which has no announced end date as of this posting. The second is the end of 2027, when the Bell Boulevard bridge is set to open and finally connect Lakeline Park to the rest of the system. Between now and then, the city still has to finalize a design contract for the broader Phase 2 work, so expect incremental updates rather than one big reveal.
For residents, that timeline is the actual planning tool. If you are choosing a regular walking or biking loop, choosing where to bring visiting family for an afternoon, or deciding whether a listing's "trail access" claim holds up on foot, the answer depends on which of these four segments you are standing on, not on the combined 31-mile figure the city likes to cite.
That is worth knowing before you assume the whole system links up, because right now, for anyone on two feet or two wheels, it does not.
If you are weighing what a home's proximity to this trail network is actually worth, or you want a neighborhood-level read on how projects like this tend to affect value over time, the team at Golden Real Estate Group tracks this kind of local infrastructure closely. Book a consultation and we will walk you through what we're seeing on the ground, not just what's on the map.
