Highways in Canada

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Originally Posted by manny_santos

Ontario's whole system today defies logic...

Originally, the primary King's Highways were numbered between 2 and 169, Secondary Highways were 5xx and 6xx, and Tertiary Roads were 8xx (only 12 or 13 were ever designated). A few of the 1xx highways were derived from other highways:

- Hwy 169 was the original routing of Hwy 69, which took over the routing of Highway 103 in the 1970s
- Hwy 148 was a continuation of Quebec Route 148
- Part of Hwy 144 was originally Hwy 544, which was incorporated into Hwy 144 when it was built
- I don't know for sure, but I suspect Hwy 133 was derived from nearby Hwy 33

Where things get really messed up in Ontario are the County Roads, Regional Roads, District Roads, and numbered roads in certain municipalities. In many cases, the numbers change at the county/regional boundary, or are duplicates of nearby King's Highways. For example, Waterloo Regional Road 5 changes to Wellington County Road 12 when crossing the county line into Wellington. Another example involving Wellington County is County Road 6 west of Mount Forest, which runs parallel to Highway 6 and connects it with Highway 89. The numbers are often duplicated in different counties on roads with no relation to each other - for example, in addition to County Road 6 in Wellington County, there is also an unrelated County Road 6 in Oxford County that meets Highway 401, and there have been occasions where that has erroneously been referred to as "Highway 6" (which itself meets the 401 about 75km to the east). Oxford's County Road 6, to make things more complicated, changes to Perth Line 113 when it crosses the county line into Perth County, south of Stratford. Most counties have a County Road 6, a County Road 5, and so forth.

There was a very large proliferation of these County/Regional roads when King's Highways were "downloaded" in the 1990s, and in many cases the old numbers were changed (e.g. Regional Road 107 for the old Hwy 7 in Peel Region, or an unnumbered road for the old Hwy 14 in Hastings County).

The county road numbers are generally not used, unless it is the sole name of the road. For example, County Road 42 in Essex County has no other name so that is the name used, but in Middlesex County, County Road 14 is normally called Glendon Drive today. However they are still very useful for those who don't know an area well, as maps often do indicate these numbers without the road names. I find they're more confusing for the average motorist than "road geeks" like myself, as the average motorist tends to have trouble distinguishing between a crown-topped shield and a flowerpot shape for some reason.

The 1997/1998 downloads created the most confusing highway route network possible. and easily the worst in North America.

If they could have just said that a highway marker should represent a route, and NOT who's maintaining it, we could have left the signed network up and simply had maintanance downloaded over to the municipalities and the like.

And besides, the crown-topped shields are such a great sign too, much better than the flowerpots.