Conestoga Parkway - History

History

The parkway is one of the busiest roads in the region. It was completed as a four-lane freeway in the late 1960s, with the exception of the short eight-lane collector-express system serving Highway 7/Victoria Street and Wellington Street. The interchange between Highway 8 and the Conestoga Parkway was opened in 1970. Mainline traffic on Highway 8 could continue under the Conestoga, where the route defaults to King Street, to enter downtown Kitchener. The Conestoga east/north of this junction serves as a bypass of King Street.

At the time, the Conestoga Parkway and Highway 8 Freeport Diversion freeways were isolated from the 400-series highway network, as the Freeport Diversion ended at an at-grade Y-junction with King Street East. Traffic from the Freeport Diversion was treated as the mainline traffic at this interchange and King East continued to a cloverleaf interchange with Highway 401.

A direct freeway connection between Highway 401 and the Conestoga was made possible when a new bypass (secretly designated as Highway 7187, and signed with Highway 8 and Highway 401 trailblazers, but later made part of Highway 8) was opened in 1987; it featured a Y-junction with Highway 401 to serve traffic east of that junction. The cloverleaf interchange with the existing Highway 8 had several ramps realigned, and it continues to serve traffic from eastbound Highway 401.

In 1993, a four-lane extension to Baden was opened, linking up with an existing undivided four-lane expressway at New Hamburg.

Since the late 1990s, the Conestoga has undergone extensive reconstruction between Courtland Avenue and Lancaster Street, with the addition of an Ontario "tall-wall" concrete median barrier and high-mast lighting replacing the conventional mercury truss lights. The widening project resulted that stretch of the Parkway being expanded to at least six lanes by using the grass median, and eight lanes between Highway 8 and Victoria Street/Frederick Street by using the right-of-way afforded by the shoulders. In 2004, extensive improvements were completed around the former obsolete and bottlenecked "half-cloverleaf" junction with the freeway section of Highway 8, that links it to the Highway 401. This included a new flyover semi-directional ramp from Conestoga westbound to Highway 8 eastbound, while the ramp in the opposite direction was realigned to allow it to carry two lanes of traffic at a higher speed.

An observation which may seem odd for those new to the highway is the stark difference in the congested, inefficient exit for Highway 7/Victoria Street, when compared with the high-capacity but underused Wellington Street exit just north of it. Both exits are served by a collector-express system. This is due to the expectation that Highway 7 would be redirected as a controlled-access highway and attached to the existing Wellington Street interchange; these plans have languished for over 30 years and are still in the planning stages.