If you ride, walk, or run the Legacy Trail on any kind of regular schedule, you've already hit the barricade. Somewhere around Newtown Springs Drive, the smooth pavement just stops. A detour sign points you toward Citation Boulevard, and if you're like most people who've used this trail for years, your first thought wasn't "how long will this take" so much as "why now."
Here's the part that doesn't show up on the orange detour signs: this closure has almost nothing to do with the trail itself. The Legacy Trail is caught in the middle of a much bigger project happening on Newtown Pike, and understanding that project changes what the closure actually means for anyone who lives nearby.
What's Actually Being Built
Crews closed a mile-and-a-half stretch of the trail between Newtown Springs Drive and Citation Boulevard starting March 30, 2026. Kentucky's Transportation Cabinet described it as an 18-month closure, with a detour routed along Citation Boulevard in the meantime. Buried in the announcement was the real story: officials aren't just patching the trail. They're realigning it, building a new pedestrian underpass south of Citation Boulevard, and adding roughly 1,200 feet of new trail that connects to Newtown Court.
That underpass is the whole point. Right now, trail users cross Newtown Pike at grade, on foot or on a bike, sharing pavement with cars. Newtown Pike is being widened as part of a broader I-75 project that will eventually carry six lanes of traffic through that stretch, part of a 2.3-mile corridor expansion running from the Paris Pike exit down to the I-75/I-64 interchange, where the interstate itself is going to eight lanes total. A six-lane crossing on foot is not a small ask. The $1.5 million underpass project exists specifically so trail users never have to make that crossing at all once construction wraps.
So the closure isn't cosmetic maintenance. It's the trail getting rerouted underneath a road that's about to get a lot bigger and a lot faster.
Proof It's Actually Moving
Eighteen months is a long time to reroute a habit, and it's fair to wonder whether anything is happening behind those barricades. As of late July 2026, something was. Crews shifted traffic on Newtown Pike overnight between Newtown Court and Citation Boulevard so they could move vehicles onto the first completed portion of the underpass. That's a small detail, but it's the kind of thing that tells you the project is on a real timeline rather than stalled behind paperwork. Lane closures were temporary and lanes reopened by early morning, but the shift itself marked forward progress on the tunnel structure that will eventually carry the trail beneath the road.
If the original 18-month window holds from its March 2026 start, the segment should reopen sometime in the second half of 2027. City leaders have described 2027 as the target for full completion, which lines up with that math.
The Closure At a Glance
| Detail | What's happening |
|---|---|
| Segment closed | Between Newtown Springs Drive and Citation Boulevard, about 1.5 miles |
| Closure started | March 30, 2026 |
| Expected duration | 18 months |
| What's being built | A new pedestrian and cyclist underpass south of Citation Boulevard, plus about 1,200 feet of new trail connecting to Newtown Court |
| Why | Newtown Pike is widening to six lanes as part of the larger I-75 corridor project |
| Detour | Reroute via Citation Boulevard |
How to Keep Your Routine Without the Middle Mile
The good news is that the closure only affects the middle section. The north end, running up through horse country to the Kentucky Horse Park, is untouched. So is the south end, which winds through the more urban stretch toward downtown and the YMCA trailhead near Setzer Way and West Loudon Avenue. If your usual route crosses through the Newtown Pike gap, a few adjustments keep the habit alive without much extra thought.
- Start or end at Coldstream Regional Park. The 224-acre park sits right at Newtown Pike and Citation Boulevard, with direct trail access on both sides of the closure. Parking there lets you pick whichever half of the trail you want without backtracking through the construction zone.
- Treat the two halves as separate rides. Instead of one long loop, run the Horse Park side one day and the downtown side another. Both are still fully open and both keep their usual scenery.
- Use the Citation Boulevard detour if you need the connection. It's not scenic, but it's the official reroute and it gets you through the gap on foot or by bike.
- Have a backup for run days. One regular trail user put it simply when asked what he'd do instead:
"There's a lot of parks in Lexington; I'll go to Shillito Park if I have to run."
Shillito Park isn't a replacement for 12 miles of horse-country scenery, but it's a real option on days when the detour isn't worth the trouble.
Why the Wait Is Actually the Point
It's easy to read an 18-month closure as pure inconvenience, and for anyone who built a Saturday morning around this trail, it is an inconvenience. But the underpass is solving a problem that was only going to get worse. A road carrying six lanes of traffic is not a crossing you want cyclists and pedestrians navigating at street level, especially with the interstate widening happening at the same time just up the corridor. Once the underpass opens, the trail passes underneath Newtown Pike entirely. No light to wait for, no traffic to time, no crossing at all.
That's a meaningfully different trail than the one that existed before construction started. The Legacy Trail was built back in 2010 as one of the lasting projects tied to Lexington hosting the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games, and it has quietly become one of the most used pieces of infrastructure in the city. Making its most dangerous crossing point disappear entirely is not a small upgrade. It's the kind of fix that changes how comfortable a stretch of trail feels for the next decade of people who use it.
For now, that means working around a construction zone for a while longer. But the detour has an end date attached to it, and what's waiting on the other side is a trail that no longer asks you to share a six-lane road with cars just to keep your routine intact.
If you're the kind of person who already knows which mile of the Legacy Trail is your favorite, you probably didn't need convincing that this corner of Lexington is worth paying attention to. And if you're weighing whether a neighborhood like this, one where infrastructure decisions get made with daily foot and bike traffic in mind, is where you want to put down roots, that's a conversation Michelle Conner is always glad to have. Let's connect.
