Ontario Highway 2

Highway 2
Highway 2 highlighted in red
Route information
Maintained by Ministry of Transportation of Ontario
Length	0.9 km[1] (0.56 mi; 3,000 ft) 834.56 km (518.57 mi) before 1997[2]
History	1794 as the Governor's Road August 21, 1917, as The Provincial Highway
Major junctions
West end	Gananoque eastern limits
East end	Highway 401 westbound off ramp
Location
Country	Canada
Province	Ontario
Major cities	(Before 1996) Windsor, Chatham, London, Brantford, Hamilton, Burlington, Mississauga, Toronto, Oshawa Belleville, Kingston, Cornwall
Highway system
Ontario provincial highways Current Former 400-series
← Highway 427 → Highway 3
Former provincial highways Highway 2A  →

King's Highway 2, commonly referred to as Highway 2, is the lowest-numbered provincially maintained highway in the Canadian province of Ontario, and was originally part of a series of identically numbered highways which started in Windsor, stretched through Quebec and New Brunswick, and ended in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Prior to the 1990s, Highway 2 travelled through many of the major cities in Southern Ontario, including Windsor, Chatham, London, Brantford, Hamilton, Burlington, Mississauga, Toronto, Oshawa, Belleville, Kingston and Cornwall, and many other smaller towns and communities.

Once the primary east–west route across the southern portion of Ontario, most of Highway 2 was bypassed by Highway 401, which was completed in 1968. The August 1997 completion of Highway 403 bypassed one final section through Brantford. Virtually all of the 847.3 km (526.5 mi) length of Highway 2 was deemed a local route and removed from the provincial highway system by January 1, 1998, with the exception of a one-kilometre (0.62 mi) section east of Gananoque. The entire route remains driveable, but as County Road 2 or County Highway 2 in most regions.

Portions of what became Highway 2 served as early settlement trails, post roads and stagecoach routes. While the arrival of the railroad in the mid-19th century diminished the importance of the route, the advent of the bicycle and later the automobile renewed interest in roadbuilding. A 73.7-kilometre (45.8 mi) segment of Highway 2 between Pickering and Port Hope was the first section of roadway assumed by the newly-formed Department of Public Highways (DPHO) on August 21, 1917. By the end of 1920, the department had taken over roads connecting Windsor with the Quebec boundary at Rivière-Beaudette, which it would number as Provincial Highway 2 in the summer of 1925. In 1930, the DPHO was renamed the Department of Highways (DHO), and provincial highways became King's Highways. By this time, it was one of the dominant transportation arteries across southern Ontario and was 878.2-kilometre (545.7 mi) long.^[3]

The section of Highway 2 between Hamilton and Toronto along Lakeshore Road became the first paved intercity road in Ontario in 1914. Beginning in the mid-1930s, the DHO began reconstructing several portions of the highway into the new German-inspired "dual highway", including east from Scarborough along Kingston Road. This would be the progenitor to Highway 401, which was built in a patchwork fashion across Southern Ontario throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, often as bypass of and parallel to Highway 2 (except between Woodstock and Toronto). Conversely, the importance of Highway 2 for long-distance travel was all but eliminated, and coupled with the increasing suburbanization of the Greater Toronto Area, it became simply a series of urban arterials street between Hamilton and Oshawa.

Having been replaced in importance by the parallel freeways of Highway 401, the Queen Elizabeth Way, and finally Highway 403, the province gradually transferred sections of the route back to the municipal, county and regional governments that it passed through, a process known as downloading. In 1997 and 1998, the province downloaded 391.6 kilometres (243.3 mi) of Highway 2 and rescinded dozens of Connecting Link agreements, reducing the route to its current length.