History
Highway 8 is one of the oldest provincial highways in Ontario, having first been established in 1918. Up until the early 1970s, the highway was much longer than its current length, extending from Goderich through Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge, and Hamilton to Niagara Falls. However, in 1970, the Government of Ontario decided that the stretch of Highway 8 between Winona (just east of Hamilton) and Niagara Falls was no longer of major transportation significance, since by this time most traffic used the Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW), just to the north, to go between the two locales. Accordingly, the province downloaded this section of the highway to the newly-formed Regional Municipality of Niagara, which designated the road as Regional Road 81. In 1998, the provincial government of Mike Harris carried another downloading of the highway to municipal authorities; this time the section between the town of Peters Corners (near Dundas) and Winona was transferred to the Regional Municipality of Hamilton-Wentworth.
In 2004, extensive improvements were completed around the former obsolete and bottle-necked "half-cloverleaf" interchange of the Conestoga Parkway and Highway 8 in Kitchener. 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.
In 2002-2004 the Highway 8 freeway was widened from four to eight lanes from the interchange to just east of Franklin Street, which necessitated moving one retaining wall and a new overpass with Franklin Street. Since 2006, work has been underway to widen the freeway to eight lanes, including the Fairway Road interchange. By 2011, this work had been completed to approximately 1 km. east of the Fairway Road exit. The Grand River construction project aimed at carrying 3 lanes of traffic in each direction was completed in July 2012.
In September 2012, MTO completed the reconstruction of the three-road junction at Peters Corners, the eastern terminus of Highway 8, as a roundabout with separate traffic signals for the northern (Westover Road) and southeastern (Hamilton Road 8) arms.
Read more about this topic: Ontario Highway 8
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