Denton: I-35E Closes Completely Tonight and Tuesday Night, 9 P.M. to 5 A.M., for Merge Bridge Work
Both directions of mainlanes shut between North Texas Boulevard and Bonnie Brae Street, with traffic diverted to the service roads — the sharpest closure yet in TxDOT's $583 million rebuild of the I-35E/I-35W split.
DENTON — The PM drive's hardest fact is north of the city tonight: Interstate 35E through Denton closes completely — both directions of mainlanes — between North Texas Boulevard and Bonnie Brae Street from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. tonight, and again Tuesday night, for bridge work at the I-35E/I-35W merge, according to traffic schedules compiled from TxDOT and local reporting. Traffic will be diverted to the service road. Similar intermittent closures hit the interchange late last week; tonight's are the full pattern, not the partial one.
The work is one piece of the corridor's long rebuild: TxDOT's I-35 and I-35E/I-35W interchange project runs about 4.8 miles from North Texas Boulevard to U.S. 77 north of Denton, widening the freeway from four lanes to six, upgrading ramps and frontage roads and rebuilding the split itself — including a direct connector from northbound I-35E to southbound I-35W, braided ramps, a fly-over exit from northbound I-35W to Oak Street and retaining walls throughout. TxDOT's project fact sheet lists an estimated cost of $583 million, contractor SEMA Construction, a spring 2025 start and an estimated completion of summer 2029; Denton's October mobility report puts the merge rebuild nearer $588.8 million with a January 2030 finish — the two figures are kept separate here because they come from separate documents, and the gap between them is itself the honest state of a project this size.
For tonight, the practical advice is the compiled guidance: leave early, use the frontage roads when the mainlanes shut at 9 p.m., and expect the pattern to repeat — this is a years-long rebuild, not a weekend job, and no local tax proposition is attached to it (the dollars are TxDOT construction funds). Drivers crossing Denton after 9 p.m. tonight or Tuesday night should build the diversion into the trip; the desk's overnight and morning files will carry the reopening and any change to the pattern as TxDOT reports it.
