Quote:
Originally Posted by daud
There was some discussion on this 417 alignment on another thread (or maybe this one way way back). As it is, we probably have an extra 20 minutes of driving due to the routing of 417/40.
In the previous discussion, I found it interesting...Someone mentioned, the 417 route was chosen with Cornwall in mind and on the Quebec Side, the 40 routing was chosen with a bridge at Pointe-Fortune in mind to connect to highway 50.
Both decisions resulted in this loopy longer route we have which I figure is about 15-20 extra minutes travel time.
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That makes sense for the Ontario routing that dips southward, but not for the Quebec routing which is built fairly close to the historic Montreal-Ottawa road near the river. (There was talk of a bridge at Pointe-Fortune it is true, but that's not the main reason for the routing.)
That old Montreal-Ottawa road was known as Highway 17 in both provinces (yes Ontario and Quebec had highway numbers in common at one point).
Quebec built the A-40 to the Ontario border as early as 1966. From the border it followed the old Quebec Highway 17 routing for quite some distance, and then A-40 veers a bit to the northeast to the big bridge at Vaudreuil.
The old Quebec Highway 17 used to continue along a more southeastern route into Vaudreuil and Dorion, where it met up with the highway coming in from Toronto, and then the road went into Montreal.
Ontario did not build the divided Highway 417 across rural Eastern Ontario until a decade or more after Quebec completed A-40 to the border in 1966. And so for many years the drive from Ottawa to Montreal was on the four-lane Queensway (Highway 17) to the Montreal Road, exit, then a two lane Highway 17 through Orleans, Cumberland, Rockland, etc. to the Quebec border at Pointe-Fortune where the A-40 expressway started. The new Highway 417 was only completed by Ontario in the mid to late 70s I think.
Another interesting fact is that there for a long time there was a highway numbered as "2" that went all the way from southern Ontario, across Quebec down to Edmundston, across NB and into NS. All with the same number.