A section of 18th Street west of Maine Street is closed to vehicular traffic, improving the safety in the neighborhood. The street can be opened to allow traffic quicker exits from games at Allen Fieldhouse. The road surface, visible beyond the removable yellow poles, is a concrete lattice that allows grass to grow through holes.

The temporary barriers are gone. The signs are gone. The pavement’s gone.

In their place along 18th Street is a new concrete lattice, one strong enough to support the weight of hundreds of cars, vans and SUVs leaving after a Kansas University basketball game, but open enough to allow new grass to grow, bicycles to pass through and neighbors to rest easy.

Its formal name is a “permanent traffic diverter,” and its designed purpose is to help clear traffic from a neighborhood after basketball games, while preventing others from cutting through the residential area at all other times.

But Rej Rasing, who lives at the corner where 18th Street ends and the diverter begins, knows the project by a different name.

“It’s the line of demarcation,” said Rasing, who’s lived in a house at the corner of 18th and Missouri streets for the past 10 years. “There’s one side of the neighborhood over here, and another over there.”

And everyone else? No longer driving down 18th Street as an alternate to the busier 19th Street. “People used to go 80 (mph) through here,” Rasing said. “I used to see a wreck out here all the time. Now it’s been nice. It’s really slowing traffic down.”

The diverter offers a new approach to an old problem in the University Place neighborhood: too many cars squeezing through too-narrow streets. The diverter concept, launched with temporary barriers five years ago, came at the request of residents. A neighborhood survey had revealed that a majority of respondents supported the idea of closing off the stretch of 18th Street, between Maine and the alley a half block to the west.

But the temporary barricades were just that – temporary – and drivers routinely cast them aside to make way for their motor vehicles.

Now that there are concrete pavers in place, limestone boulders flanking the entrances and yellow barrier bars blocking the way – removable by police, who have keys to release them – the pathway looks to be used by cars only 21 times this year. That’s when the KU men’s basketball team takes the court at Allen Fieldhouse.

“I think it serves its purpose,” said David Cronin, project engineer for the city’s Department of Public Works, which paid $27,000 to have the diverter made permanent.