Anyone who’s merged onto US 75 in Melissa during a weekday commute already knows the road hasn’t kept pace with how fast this city has grown. That’s about to change, at least in one direction — the Texas Department of Transportation began widening US 75 from four to six lanes along the stretch running from County Line Road, at the Collin-Grayson county line, down to the SH 5/FM 902 interchange, which is Melissa’s own exit off the freeway. Work started in May 2025, with completion anticipated by 2028.
Why This Segment Matters More Than It Sounds
A lot of highway projects in North Texas happen somewhere else and only affect a city indirectly. This one is different because the southern end of the widened segment is literally the Highway 5 exit Melissa residents use every day — the same interchange that feeds downtown, the H-E-B-anchored retail along Highway 5, and the route most people take to get from the city’s newer subdivisions onto the freeway system at all. A wider freeway at that exact interchange has a direct bearing on how bad or how manageable the merge onto US 75 feels during peak commute hours, both now during construction and once the project wraps.
It’s also part of a broader pattern of highway investment tracking Melissa’s growth rather than lagging years behind it. Just to the south, the Sam Rayburn Tollway itself — which runs concurrent with US 75 through this stretch of Collin County — has already gone through its own fourth-lane widening project between Denton Tap Road in Coppell and US 75 in McKinney, a roughly $200 million undertaking the North Texas Tollway Authority began in January 2019. Together, the two projects reflect just how much regional transportation planning has had to catch up to a corridor that includes some of the fastest-growing cities in the entire Dallas-Fort Worth area.
What to Expect During Construction
Multi-year freeway widening projects come with the obvious near-term downside: lane closures, shifted traffic patterns, and construction zones that make an already-busy commute slower before it gets better. For Melissa residents commuting north toward Sherman or south toward McKinney, Plano, and Dallas, the next couple of years are likely to mean planning for some unpredictability around the County Line Road to Highway 5 stretch specifically, with the payoff being two additional through lanes once the project completes around 2028.
The Bigger Picture
Melissa’s population has climbed from around 13,900 at the 2020 Census toward an estimated 32,900 today, and none of that growth happened because the road network expanded first — it happened because rooftops went up faster than infrastructure could keep pace, which is the normal, if frustrating, order of operations in a boomtown. A six-lane US 75 at the Highway 5 interchange won’t solve every commute headache Melissa residents deal with, but it’s a concrete sign that state transportation planners have caught up to what’s already obvious to anyone sitting in traffic on a Tuesday morning: this stretch of Collin County isn’t a sleepy exit anymore, and hasn’t been for a while.
What Commuters Can Do in the Meantime
Multi-year projects like this one rarely move in a straight line — lane closures shift, work zones move to different segments of the corridor as different phases progress, and the worst congestion doesn’t always happen where you’d expect based on where the construction signs are posted. TxDOT typically publishes updated project information and any public meeting notices through its Dallas district office, and checking those updates periodically over the next couple of years is a more reliable way to plan around the work than relying on word of mouth or outdated information from when the project first broke ground. For daily commuters, the practical advice doesn’t change much from any other multi-year freeway project: build in extra time during the first few months of any new phase, since traffic patterns tend to be least predictable right after a shift in lane configuration, before drivers collectively adjust.
Local Roads Feeding Into the Project
The interchange being widened doesn’t operate in isolation — Highway 5 itself carries a significant share of Melissa’s local traffic, connecting the historic downtown around Cooper Street to the newer retail and residential growth spreading east and west. As the US 75 interchange work progresses, it’s worth watching for any secondary effects on Highway 5 traffic patterns closer to town, since drivers rerouting to avoid freeway construction sometimes push more volume onto the surface streets that feed the interchange, at least temporarily.
A Multi-Year Project, Not a Quick Fix
It’s worth setting expectations accordingly: a project of this scope, spanning several miles and requiring the kind of earthwork and structural changes involved in adding two full travel lanes, doesn’t move quickly even when funded and actively under construction. The 2028 completion estimate gives a general sense of pace, but major highway projects in Texas have a track record of both meeting and missing initial completion dates depending on weather delays, funding adjustments, and unexpected utility conflicts discovered mid-project. Residents planning around this project long-term are better served treating that date as a reasonable estimate rather than a guarantee.
