New Zealand State Highway 8
Template: Infobox trunk road / Maintenance / NZ- S
Regions:
- Canterbury
- Otago
The State Highway 8 (SH 8) is a New Zealand State Highway. It is 457 km long and was formerly one of the eight national state highways. It forms a semi-circle in a counterclockwise direction and passes through the Mackenzie Basin and Central Otago. Beginning and end of the highway form junctions on State Highway 1 kilometer runs from north to south.
The SH 8, both in cities and in rural areas, for the most part a road with one lane in each direction with intersections and property accesses, ie equivalent to about a federal highway / main road.
Route
The SH 8 branches in Washdyke, an industrial suburb of Timaru and first runs northwest to Fairlie. From here the route runs to the west and is rapidly gaining altitude. They passed the south end of the two great lakes of the Mackenzie Basin, Lake Tekapo and Lake Pukaki.
From Pukaki the road turns to the southwest and crosses the upper part of the valley of the Waitaki River and the towns of Twizel and Omarama. Then the road rises again and reaches the 971 m high Lindis Pass its highest point. The road now follows the valley of the Lindis River and reaches the upper reaches of the Clutha River near Tarras.
From here, the highway passes near the east coast of the lake Lake Dunstan along and reached at the southern end of the town of Cromwell. The SH 8 follows from here the Clutha through the gorge Cromwell Gorge and passes in the Clyde Clyde Dam, New Zealand's largest dam for hydroelectric power generation. The road follows the Clutha by Alexandra and meets here on the SH 85 now runs along the west bank of the Clutha and Lake Roxburgh south to Roxburgh. Much of this route section leads through orchards and along the mining areas of Otago gold rush.
From the Roxburgh SH 8 a southeasterly direction follows. It crosses Ettrick, Raes Junction and Beaumont. There the SH8 leaves the valley of the Clutha direction of Lawrence. From there the road extends over Waitahuna and the winding gorge Manuka Gorge, only to reach the level of Tokomairiro River at Clarksville, two miles south of Milton. Here, the second terminal of the SH 8 at the SH is 1
The SH 8 has two branches, the SH 8A and 8B, the SH. These connect it to the State Highway 6 on the west shore of Lake Dunstan. The State Highway 8A extends over 23 km from the SH 6 at Luggate for connection to the SH 8 near Tarras. The State Highway 8B is only 2.6 km long and runs from SH 8 at Deadmans Point across the lake to Cromwell.
Route changes:
The course of the SH 8 between Clyde and Tarras were changed in the 1980s because of the construction of the Clyde Dam. This flooded a large part of de Cromwell Gorge, including the former route. Therefore, a completely new section was built between Clyde and Cromwell. The former bridge with only one common lane for both directions was replaced 1.5 km north of the old site by a two-lane bridge.
Statistics
2011 had the SH 8 in a medium traffic volumes between 1219 and 8253 vehicles in Bendigo vehicles in the local implementation of Alexandra. At the eleven measuring points 9-18 % of the vehicles had a mass of 3.5 tonnes or more. The SH 8A had an average traffic volume 646-858 vehicles, the SH 8B between 3930 to the Dead Mans Point Bridge to 4500 near the junction with the SH 6