Our highways grid should be tourist-friendly

Anyone who is skeptical about our concern should get a copy of the Ontario government's official 2006-07 road map.

In our submission, no other North America jurisdiction has been as cavalier as Ontario in its treatment of tourists. We have, today, a system of provincial, county, regional and municipal roadways that may make some sense to some local politicians but must be utterly bewildering to a visitor from outside the province, particularly if he or she last visited in the mid-1990s.

The road between Pearson International Airport and Stayner now known as Airport Road is shown on the government map as a straight line with three different numbers and two different colours. It's County 18 in Dufferin and 42 in Simcoe and shown there in red, indicating a "major road" (whatever that means), but south of that it's numbered 7 and shown in grey as a "minor road." A tourist wanting to reach Pearson Airport without going on a minor road would detour to the east and go down a red line marked as 50, then somehow find their way to the airport using the inset Toronto area map, which suddenly shows that by turning right along something numbered 107 they can return to that old minor road 7, which finally is named as Airport Road and shown (south of 107) in RED

There's the case of the former provincial highways which, in some cases, have either shrunk to the point of almost vanishing or have become uniquely Ontarian, as intermittent routes designed to baffle the traveller. Our best local example is Highway 9, which used to run from Kincardine to Newmarket, but now is missing in action between Harriston and Orangeville. However, there are many other examples, a couple of classics being Highways 3 and 7, which remain provincial highways and marked as such in some places but bear an assortment of different numbers where they've been downloaded.

Much of the blame must rest with the former Mike Harris Conservative government, which dumped about 5,000 kilometres of King's Highways on the shoulders of local municipalities claiming they all had no purpose beyond meeting local needs and therefore should be paid for entirely by local property owners.

However, the McGuinty Liberals have done absolutely nothing thus far to fix the mess other than acknowledge that at some point something must be done to preserve and enhance the infrastructure.

For reasons never explained, the downloading aimed at reducing the provincial deficit was accompanied by removal of all the highway markers, which seemingly had been regarded as there merely to denote ownership, rather than to guide the travelling public. Peel Region was one of the few recipients of the downloading which at least erected new tiny markers showing that the various roads were formerly highways.

Ontario's highway system might be said to have gown "like Topsy," with relatively little in the way of long-term planning to this day. However, anyone who looks today at a government road map produced in the 1950s would see that at one point the King's Highways system made a lot of sense.

But we also had some routes that seemed to have been designed to fulfill several purposes, an example being Highway 24.

Today, only one small stretch of 24 remains, between the southern edge of Cambridge and its junction with Highway 403 in Brantford. And although most of the original highway is still numbered 24 or 124, it has disappeared altogether between Caledon village and the edge of Shelburne.

Surely the time has come for government actions aimed at making the existing road network truly tourist-friendly. Our suggestion would be that Transportation Minister Donna Canfield quickly set up a task force that would include some planning experts and experienced municipal politicians, as well as representatives of her ministry, to recommend an entirely new system of major, secondary and tourist highways, the maintenance costs of which would be shared by the province and municipalities based on origin destination studies. The task force's mandate should minimally require the designation of at least one east-west provincial highway route that avoids entering the present and future gridlock in the GTA.

The next step should be for the province and municipalities to work out new numbering for county and regional roads that now form logical routes but have several numbers, even within a county or region.