Wasson Way Construction Is Coming. Not to Your End of the Trail.

If you walk the dog on Wasson Way most mornings, you've probably seen a headline this year about construction starting on the trail. Maybe it made you wonder if your usual loop through Ault Park is about to get torn up.

It isn't. The construction that's actually breaking ground is happening more than four miles away, on the opposite end of the trail entirely. What's planned for the Mount Lookout side hasn't even reached a construction date yet. Those are two different projects, on two different timelines, and conflating them is an easy mistake to make if you only skim the news.

Two Projects, Not One

Wasson Way currently runs about 4.3 to 4.5 miles, from Old Red Bank Road at the edge of Ault Park in Mount Lookout, west through Hyde Park, Oakley, and Evanston, past Xavier University, to its current terminus at Blair Court in Avondale. That's the finished trail. It has been substantially complete since Phase 6A opened through Evanston into Avondale in 2023.

Phase 7 is the next piece, and it's the one generating the headlines. In May 2026, the city secured a $4.1 million federal Surface Transportation Block Grant, through the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments, to fund it. The project extends the trail roughly 0.7 miles from Blair Court to a shared-use path along Martin Luther King Drive near Reading Road, deep in Uptown. The city's own transportation department describes construction starting in late 2026 and wrapping by spring 2028, while other reporting on the project points to a July 2026 start and a late 2027 finish. Either way, the work zone is entirely west of Xavier University's campus, nowhere near Mount Lookout.

Cincinnati's Department of Transportation and Engineering has been public about why this final stretch matters. As the city's Elese Daniel put it when discussing the project, the goal is connecting infrastructure that already exists into the Uptown medical and university corridor, giving Avondale residents and commuters a direct link they don't currently have.

That's a real, funded, dated project. It just isn't yours.

What's Actually Planned for the Mount Lookout End

The project that would eventually touch your end of the trail is called the Eastern Extension, and it's a different animal entirely. It would extend Wasson Way from Ault Park east to Armleder Park, connecting into the Lunken Airport Trail and, from there, the 78-mile Little Miami Scenic Trail. It's genuinely exciting on paper: a rider could theoretically leave a driveway near the Mount Lookout square and, without ever touching a road bike lane, end up on a trail system that reaches all the way to Yellow Springs.

But as of the most recent project updates from the Wasson Way nonprofit, the Ohio Department of Transportation has completed only the feasibility study. The project is moving into design, not construction. There is no groundbreaking date. A centerpiece of the plan is repurposing the existing railroad bridge over Red Bank Road as a connector, which is a bigger engineering lift than it sounds and one reason this phase is further out than Phase 7.

Here's the two projects side by side:

If you live near the Mount Lookout square and use the trail regularly, the practical takeaway is simple: nothing about your route is scheduled to close, detour, or change this year.

What Hasn't Changed at Your Trailhead

The Old Red Bank Road entrance at the northeast corner of Ault Park has been the trail's finished eastern anchor since Phase 5 opened in December 2021, when Wasson Way crossed the rehabilitated 1884 railroad bridge that once carried Cincinnati & Eastern Railway trains through the park. That bridge work, a $3.6 million project at the time, replaced the concrete deck and rehabbed the piers and steel beams before the trail reopened through a set of switchback paths that climb and descend through the park's wooded northeast corner.

None of that infrastructure is part of either project currently in motion. The switchbacks, the bridge, the connection into Ault Park's Valley Trail footpath, all of it is finished work that predates both Phase 7 and the Eastern Extension by years.

Ault Park itself remains the same 224 acres it's always been, with its Italian Renaissance-style pavilion, the Brumm and Rose gardens, and cherry blossom groves that draw crowds every March and April. It's also, geologically, one of the better spots in the city to see exposed layers of Cincinnati's ancient bedrock, if that's the kind of walk you like to take.

A few things worth knowing if you use the trail regularly:

• The stretch through the park has a Strava segment, logged as "Wasson Way, the Whole Shebang," running from Montgomery Road to Madison Road, that has recorded more than 700 attempts from local cyclists and runners.
• The corridor's mix of open rail bed, backyard edges, and dense timber supports more than 40 recorded bird species, according to trail naturalists who track the route.
• Dogs are welcome on Wasson Way but need to stay leashed, which is worth remembering given how many households along the route use it as a daily walking loop.
• Public art keeps showing up along the corridor, including a mural at the Duke Energy Operation Center, part of a slow, ongoing effort to treat the trail as a linear gallery as much as a commute.

Why the Confusion Happens

Coverage of Wasson Way tends to lump every phase together under one name, which makes sense since it's one trail with one advocacy nonprofit behind it. But the funding, the engineering, and the construction calendars for Phase 7 and the Eastern Extension are entirely separate processes, moving at entirely separate speeds. One has a federal grant number attached to it. The other is still working through a feasibility study.

If you search for updates on the trail this fall, you'll likely find stories about Uptown, Avondale, and Martin Luther King Drive. That's real, it's happening, and it's worth knowing about if you commute toward the University of Cincinnati medical campus. It just doesn't reach the Mount Lookout side of the park.

The version of the trail near Ault Park has been stable since 2021, and based on what's actually funded and dated right now, it's going to stay that way for a while longer. The switchbacks, the bridge, the cherry blossoms in the spring, the birds in the hedgerows along the corridor, all of it is exactly as it was last year, and the year before that.

That stability is worth something on its own. A trail segment that's been finished for five years and isn't scheduled for any disruption is a known quantity, which is more than you can say for most infrastructure in a growing city. Whatever ends up happening with the Eastern Extension down the road, for now the daily version of Wasson Way that Mount Lookout residents actually use is the same one it's been since the ribbon cutting.

We spend a lot of time paying attention to the small, specific things that make Mount Lookout function day to day, from trail phases to square storefronts, because that's the kind of detail that tells you what living here is actually like. If you're curious what else is changing, or not changing, in this part of Cincinnati, Johnson Real Estate Group keeps a close eye on it.