photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Cars pass by on the newly reopened Ninth Street on Friday, Sept. 4, 2026.

Traffic has finally begun flowing again on Ninth Street, which had been closed to through traffic since December 2025 for the Jayhawk Watershed project.

The City of Lawrence said in a news release that the street reopened Thursday, in time for Kansas football’s first home game of the 2026 season on Friday.

As the Journal-World has reported, the street was closed to allow crews to replace the more than 100-year-old storm sewers on Ninth to mitigate flooding in the neighborhood. The street’s design has also changed; instead of two lanes in each direction, there’s now only one in each direction and a shared center turning lane. The extra space will eventually be used to add bike lanes with physical barriers.

On Friday afternoon, traffic was moving smoothly between Tennessee and Mississippi streets. Orange cones were up at Ninth and Tennessee to funnel drivers into the new one-lane configuration, and the temporary parking spaces the city had painted in the center of the street during the construction were all covered up.

There will still be some construction going on in the next few weeks, the city’s release said. As work continues, drivers “should expect lane shifts and temporary delays,” and traffic on cross streets such as Tennessee and Kentucky “may experience short delays and medium-term closures of less than an hour at certain times.”

The city also asked drivers to look out for manholes in the westbound lanes that protrude above the pavement. It said this will be adjusted as the remaining work on the project is finished up.