MORE FUN FACTS ABOUT ONTARIO ROADS

Here’s more from Footpaths to Freeways: The Story of Ontario’s Roads, published by the Ontario Ministry of Transportation and Communications in 1984. Who knew the history of roads could be so interesting? For more on this fascinating topic, you’ll just have to wait for my book on the Muskoka Colonization Road!

Car licences have been issued in Ontario since 1903. The earliest were leather tags; licence plates came about in 1925.

The first highway patrol officer was appointed in 1907. Until 1946, motorcycle patrol officers had to buy their own motorcycles.

Chauffeurs had to have drivers’ licences starting in 1909; licences became compulsory for all Ontario drivers in 1927. At first there was no driver’s test; you just filled out an application form.

By 1914 traffic jams were a constant problem along Lake Shore Road between Toronto and Hamilton.

Ontario’s first hard-surfaced highway, between Toronto and Hamilton, was paved in cement and completed in 1917. It was built to help deal with the traffic jams on Lake Shore Road and at the time, it was one of the longest hard-surfaced highways in the world.

The first gasoline tax came into effect in 1925, to help pay for highway improvements.

Ontario’s first set of traffic lights was installed in Hamilton in July 1925 at the intersection of King and Main Streets.

When it opened in 1939, the Queen Elizabeth Way in the Niagara region was the longest continuous divided highway in Canada.

Highway 400 is the second-longest freeway in Ontario (401 is the longest.) The 400 stretches from Toronto through Barrie to Parry Sound and will end up in Sudbury in about 2017. The portion of the highway between Toronto and Lake Simcoe roughly follows the route of the historic “Toronto Carrying-Place Trail” a major portage route linking Lake Ontario with Lake Simcoe and the northern Great Lakes. The trail was widely used over three hundred years ago by First Nations people and fur traders.