A look at the growth of roads in Ontario

By Carol Macpherson, June 2017

Ontario's first transportation systems weren't anything like the highways we see today. Indigenous people travelled using the vast waterways; canoeing them in summer and walking across the ice in winter. This system was so practical that people like explorers and military men who came to this land followed suit.

By the early 1800s, roadways were needed to open new areas for settlement, provide the military the means to move from place to place and to cultivate commerce. However, because various levels of government couldn't agree on who was responsible for roads, many were opened and then abandoned due to lack of maintenance.

The invention of the automobile provided a new mode of roadway transportation. It didn't take long to gain popularity. In 1907 there were only 2,131 cars 

registered in Canada but by the start of WWI less than a decade later, they were in excess of 50,000 in use.

Provincial legislation around automobiles was introduced in 1903.  Speed limits were set at 15 mph (almost 24 km/h) and owners were now required to register their vehicles. The enforcement of these laws fell primarily to municipal police forces.

Driver's licences came into effect in 1909, but for some reason, only chauffeurs driving other people's vehicles needed them.

The first cross-country trip by car was undertaken by Thomas Wilby and Jack Haney in 1912. It couldn't even be called a road trip, since there were only 16 kilometres of paved road in the entire country at the time. It took them 52 days to travel from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Alberni, British Columbia.  

As it is with most car trips, the two travellers did not always get along. Wilby wrote a 290 page book about the adventure and never once mentioned his driver by name. Haney's account of the trip notes that not once did Wilby help change a tire or push the car out of the mud, even though it happened hundreds of times.

All of the new roadways and the number of vehicles using them made traffic control necessary. For the first few years, it would have been the duty of police officers to direct the traffic through busier urban intersections. Then in 1925, the first set of traffic lights in Canada went into operation in Hamilton, Ontario.

Ottawa's first roadways

Richmond Road may be the oldest road in Ottawa. Built in 1818, it connected the military settlement at Richmond with Richmond Landing, just below the Chaudière Falls on the Ottawa River in what was then known as Bytown.

In his 1896 book "The History of the Ottawa Valley", the Rev. John L. Gourlay wrote:

"We never heard why these distinguished colonists chose the banks of the Jock in preference to those of the Rideau or the Ottawa. They arrived at the Richmond landing in 1818. Under Sergeant Hill, they organized to cut the road from the Flats, the place of their encampment, to the Jock, ever since known as the Richmond Road."

Many of the streets laid out by Colonel John By when he was building the Rideau Canal remain to this day. Wellington, Rideau, Sussex and Sparks Streets are all part of that early road system.  

Today, there are 5,661kilometres of roadway in Ottawa, as well as 233 kilometres of transitway and highways. That's pretty incredible when you consider the coast to coast distance across Canada is 6,521 kilometers.

These roadways continue to be patrolled principally by the Ottawa Police Service and some roadways in the city such as 400 series highways and the parkways fall under the jurisdiction of the RCMP and OPP.