Look Up the Road Before You Buy the House

In most of the country, if you want to know what's planned for the street in front of a house, you call the city.

In Ada County, the city doesn't know.

Roads here belong to the Ada County Highway District — an independent, separately elected taxing district responsible for planning, building and maintaining every public street, road, bridge and right-of-way in the county except state and federal highways. Boise, Meridian, Eagle, Kuna, Star and Garden City do not control their own local streets. It is the only countywide highway district in Idaho, and an arrangement with essentially no parallel among major U.S. metros.

For a buyer this is good news, because it means the answer is centralized and public. Most people just don't know where to look.

The three documents, and why the difference matters

ACHD produces several plans that sound alike and mean very different things.

The Five Year Plan (FYP) is the funded, programmed construction schedule. If a road is going to be torn up and widened in the next five years, this is where it appears. The 2026–2030 plan was adopted in October 2025, and the 2027–2031 plan went through public comment in summer 2026 with an adoption hearing scheduled for that fall. The cycle repeats annually: prioritization outreach in winter, draft and comment in late summer, adoption in early fall.

The Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) is a 20-year horizon of growth-driven capacity projects and the legal basis for impact fees. The current CIP was adopted in December 2025 at roughly $1.2 billion.

The Master Street Map (MSM) is the right-of-way preservation map. It shows the future functional class of every street — which two-lane residential road is designated to become a collector or an arterial someday. It's adopted annually.

Here's the distinction that matters to a buyer: a road can sit on the Master Street Map and the CIP for decades without ever entering the Five Year Plan. The MSM tells you what the road is planned to become. The FYP tells you whether anyone has funded it yet. You want both answers, and they're different answers.

How to actually look it up

1. Start with the FYP interactive project map on ACHD's site, which displays construction projects by proposed build year. ACHD also publishes the full project list and a "FYP at a Glance" summary as PDFs.
2. Check the Master Street Map — the 11x17 and 36x48 PDFs plus the street list — for the future classification of the specific street.
3. Check the Functional Class Map 2040, where dashed lines mark proposed arterials and collectors. ACHD notes these are not actual alignments.
4. Search project pages at ACHD's public engagement site for status and comment history. Note that it filters by project name, not by address, so you may need to know the corridor first.

For state highways, none of this applies. Chinden (US 20/26), Eagle Road (SH-55), State Street west of Boise (SH-44), SH-16, Meridian Road south of the interstate (SH-69), Broadway, and I-84 all belong to the Idaho Transportation Department, and their projects appear in ITD's own system, not ACHD's. A home on Eagle Road will show nothing in the ACHD Five Year Plan. Both lookups are required.

What "future arterial" actually costs you in feet

ACHD's design standards translate a classification into a right-of-way footprint. From the ACHD Policy Manual:

A home fronting a two-lane street flagged on the Master Street Map as a future five-lane arterial is looking at a 100-foot right-of-way footprint. Off a typical 50-foot existing right-of-way, that's roughly 25 additional feet per side. Some of that front yard is spoken for.

Worth knowing how that gets taken: when a parcel redevelops, additional right-of-way is dedicated to the district without compensation as a condition of development approval. When a stable existing home sits in the path of a widening project, ACHD's Right-of-Way Department acquires the property interest through its formal acquisition process. Those are two very different outcomes, and which one applies depends on whether you're building or just living there.

Also relevant if you're planning an addition: city setbacks are measured from the property or right-of-way line, so a future right-of-way expansion effectively pushes your buildable envelope back.

And it cuts both ways

It would be easy to read all this as "check the plan so you don't buy in front of a bulldozer." The more instructive lesson from the last year is the opposite.

In December 2025, ACHD removed the Amity Road widening entirely — every segment, including a piece that was already designed — removed the Victory Road five-lane widening between Locust Grove and Five Mile, and delayed the Cloverdale five-lane project from 2027 to 2029, the Lake Hazel and Cloverdale intersection from 2026 to 2028, and Lake Hazel between Cloverdale and Eagle from 2027 to 2029. Construction inflation and partner-agency prioritization were the stated reasons.

If you bought in southwest Boise in 2023 partly on the expectation that Amity and Victory were about to be widened, that expectation is gone. Plans get funded, delayed, and cancelled. A project four years out is a forecast, not a fact.

Meanwhile the projects that are moving: the Ustick Road widening between Ten Mile and Linder in Meridian went to construction in October 2025, the Linder Road overpass over I-84 entered its second phase in June 2026 on a roughly $27 million budget, and the State Street and Pierce Park Lane project has been under construction through 2026.

One more line item

ACHD's impact fees rose sharply. Ordinance 254, adopted in early December 2025 and effective March 1, 2026, set the fee at $5,803 per single-family home — up about 66% from roughly $3,500 — with $2,371 per apartment unit. These are paid at the time of development, not by existing homeowners, but they're now a real number inside the price of new construction.

What we do about it

Before a buyer removes contingencies, we check three things: the Five Year Plan for funded construction on the corridor, the Master Street Map for the street's future classification, and — if any state highway is nearby — ITD's project list. It takes about fifteen minutes and occasionally changes the whole conversation.

It's also the kind of thing nobody thinks to ask about until the survey stakes show up.

Sources: ACHD Five Year Plan, Capital Improvement Plan, Master Street Map, Policy Manual §§ 4000 and 7200, and Right-of-Way Department · Idaho Transportation Department · COMPASS · BoiseDev