Governor Kevin Stitt signed House Bill 2123 into law about a week ago, giving the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority broad authority to build a second bridge across the Arkansas River somewhere near Bixby. Local television covered it as a milestone, and in the narrow legislative sense it is one. But Bixby Mayor Brad Girard, the person with the most to gain from good news here, was the one who put the brakes on the story himself. Asked what the signature actually changes, he told KJRH plainly: "It does not set a date for construction. It is not saying we're going to build a bridge now."
That gap between what got signed and what gets built is the whole story for anyone pricing a home near the river in Bixby right now.
One Bridge Across a Long Stretch
The reason this bill exists at all is a stretch of geography that's easy to describe and hard to fix. There are 5.4 miles between the Creek Turnpike bridge and the Memorial Drive crossing into Bixby, and from Memorial Drive it's more than 13 miles before the next river crossing at Highway 72 in Coweta, according to reporting in the Broken Arrow Sentinel. That leaves a long stretch of river frontage in a metro area that keeps adding rooftops on both sides of it.
Oklahoma Department of Transportation Director Tim Gatz put it bluntly during a legislative budget hearing this year: the river itself functions as a barrier, and without another crossing, the existing highway gets overloaded. A 2024 traffic count at the intersection just north of the current bridge showed 30,000 vehicles a day passing through. In an interview with KJRH, Girard described the commute this way:
"Coming from Tulsa, you really have one way in, and one way out. That's Memorial Drive."
If you already live south of the river in Bixby, none of this is news. What's worth knowing is that the state just spent a legislative session confirming what you already experience every weekday morning.
This Is the Third Serious Attempt, Not the First
Bixby has tried to solve this before, twice, and both attempts stalled for reasons that are instructive.
Back in 2005, a Tulsa-based company called Infrastructure Ventures proposed building a privately funded toll bridge using Pike Pass technology, landing at East 121st Street and South Yale Avenue. Tulsa County commissioners approved it, and Bixby, Jenks, and Glenpool all endorsed the plan. The Tulsa City Council killed it anyway, objecting to the amount of land the project would need on the Tulsa side of the river.
A second version resurfaced in 2022, this time proposing a crossing near East 131st Street connecting west to a southern extension of Riverside Parkway. The Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission voted to amend its regional street plan to accommodate it, but the project never advanced past that planning step.
HB2123 is different in one specific way: it removes the fixed requirement that any new bridge sit between Delaware Avenue and Memorial Drive, giving the Turnpike Authority room to consider routes further east. Rep. Mark Tedford, who represents Jenks and helped write the bill, and Senator MarkWayne Mullin, who lives near Bixby, have both pointed to a likely corridor running from 151st Street north along what is now Kimberly-Clark Place, crossing the river to land somewhere along 121st Street west of Yale Avenue. That's a specific route floated by people close to the project, not a route locked in by law. The bill itself doesn't name a location, doesn't appropriate construction funds, and doesn't set a start date. According to News On 6, County Commissioner Kelly Dunkerley described the remaining hurdles as routing and financing questions that are "complicated," which is the same word people have used about this project since 2005.
What the Numbers Are Actually Doing While the Route Gets Sorted Out
Bixby's home price data tells a story that depends heavily on which month and which measurement you're looking at, and that inconsistency is itself worth understanding before you make a decision based on any single number you saw on a listing site.
| Snapshot | Median Price | Days on Market | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|
| January 2026 sales | $320,000 | 112 (up from 51 a year earlier) | Down 5.9% year over year |
| June 2026 sales | $385,000 | 73 (down from prior year) | Down 0.64% year over year |
| Mid-2026 average value | $325,300 | Pending in about 36 days | Up 1.8% year over year |
| July 2026 active listings | $414,000 | 79 (flat year over year) | Down 2% month over month |
These aren't four different markets. They're four different ways of slicing the same one, and the differences explain more than the raw figures do. January is a small, seasonally thin sales month, just 47 homes changed hands, so a handful of unusual sales can swing a median hard. By June, with 195 homes sold, a fuller and more representative picture emerges: prices essentially flat, days on market improving compared to a year earlier, and the share of homes selling above asking price roughly doubling to 25.74% from 12.5% the year before. Price reductions also became less common, falling from 47.22% of listings to 41.58%.
Read together, the pattern is a market that cooled from an unsustainable pace in 2025 into something closer to balanced by mid-2026, not a market in decline and not one racing back to a seller's advantage either. That balance is happening independently of the bridge news. The bill was signed about a week ago. The market data spans the better part of the year before it.
What This Means for Anyone Comparing North and South Bixby Right Now
If you're weighing a home close to the existing Memorial Drive bridge against one further south or east, here's the distinction that actually matters. The commute cost of the single-bridge bottleneck is real, it's already happening every day, and it's already reflected in how these areas compare on price and time on market. That part isn't speculative.
What is speculative is treating a possible future bridge as a reason to pay more today for a specific pocket of south Bixby. The likely corridor discussed by Tedford and Mullin, running from 151st Street to a landing near 121st and Yale, would benefit homes close to that specific alignment far more than it would benefit the city broadly, and even that alignment is described as "likely," not final. A route that different officials have wanted since 2005 without success is not a route to underwrite a purchase decision around.
For sellers marketing property in growing south Bixby subdivisions, the honest version of this story is a strength on its own. The area is adding rooftops, the market has cooled from its peak pace into something more sustainable, and buyers are still willing to pay above asking on the right home, as the June data shows. None of that needs an unbuilt bridge to make the case.
Bixby Has Solved This Problem Before, Slowly
There's a footnote to this story that's worth knowing if you walk or bike the Bixby Trail System. The pedestrian bridge that currently connects the north and south sides of town, known as Harmony Bridge, is the old vehicular crossing. The original span opened in 1911 as the longest bridge in Oklahoma and connected Bixby to Tulsa and Muskogee along the most direct route available at the time. The original span remained part of Bixby's transportation network for decades. A replacement was built about half a mile west, which became the route Memorial Drive follows today. The old vehicular crossing wasn't retired to pedestrian use until the 1990s, when a new vehicular bridge finally opened at the current location.
That's the timeline the last time Bixby actually solved this exact problem: decades between a crossing failing and its replacement being fully resolved. It's not a reason to assume the worst about HB2123. It's a reason to treat "authorized" as the first step in a long process rather than the finish line.
A Few Direct Questions
Does the new law set an actual route for the bridge? No. HB2123 removes the previous restriction that limited any new bridge to the stretch between Delaware Avenue and Memorial Drive. Officials have discussed a likely corridor near 151st Street and 121st Street west of Yale Avenue, but that's a preference stated publicly, not a route fixed in the legislation.
Should I wait to buy in south Bixby until this gets built? Based on the history here, waiting for a specific bridge alignment before making a housing decision means waiting on a project with no funding source, no construction timeline, and two prior failed attempts behind it. The commute reality south of the river exists today regardless of what happens with this bill.
Is the Bixby market cooling or holding steady? Both, depending on the month you check. The fuller mid-2026 data shows a market that's slower than its 2025 peak pace but still seeing homes sell above asking price more often than a year earlier. It's a more balanced market than a declining one.
If you're weighing a purchase on either side of the river in Bixby, or trying to figure out what a growing south Bixby neighborhood is actually worth without pricing in a bridge that may or may not ever break ground, Michael Yannacacos can walk through the specific streets and comparable sales that matter for your search. Let's Connect.
