roads

There are 14 posts tagged roads (this is page 2 of 3).

Ontario’s Vanishing Highways

This was a link included in a list of Ontario’s roads. All but this and one other of the history links were 404 (gone) on the Internet. I don’t have permission but I am saving the contents with the original link and credit to the source.

 
Ontario’s Vanishing Highways
 
Ontario’s provincial highways are becoming a kind of endangered species these days. In a largely successful effort to get the province’s budget under control, the Ontario government has been “downloading” various expenses onto counties and municipalities, one of which is Ontario’s highway system.

If you look at a map from the early 1990s, you’ll see lots of shield symbols, which represent a King’s Highway (a primary highway designation). Since around 1994, roads have been downloaded by removing the King’s Highway designation and renaming the roadway as a county road. In some cases, the numbered shield symbol has just been replaced with a county flowerpot symbol, and the number has stayed the same. In many other cases, the numbers change.

One casualty of this cost-cutting mechanism was King’s Highway 2, which was the main east-west trunk through southern Ontario before Highway 401 was completed decades ago. Highways 2 and 401 basically ran parallel, so despite the history of the road, it was cut up into strings of county roads with different numbers. Many other highways in Southern Ontario are meeting the same fate– if they haven’t disappeared altogether, they have become discontinuous, with stretches of county-designated roads (some with different numbers) in between the King’s Highway portions… somewhat confusing.

Having lived in southwestern Ontario, I drove or rode my bicycle down many of these highways, and even though they’re just name changes, I still get a little wistful. Highway 2 used to go from Detroit to (almost) Montreal. I lived blocks away from it London, and an old girlfriend lived a block away from it near Toronto. 22, 51, 73 and 81 are gone; 4, 15, 17 and 21 are being carved up, just to name a few.

I was at a farm auction once in 1995 and I saw a group of Ontario highway signs for sale. They looked brand new, but they were a configuration I’d never seen before, with number 3 on it. That made sense, since Highway 3 is nearby, but these were very different signs. I was a student at the time, and I wish to this day I could have afforded the $40 for one. According to my information, Highway 3 (which runs from Windsor to Fort Erie) remains largely intact.

The Ontario highways up in the northern half of the province are fewer in number and more spread out, and as far as I know, they aren’t going to be changing with the times, aside from stretches of road within town limits. Most of the King’s highways, secondary highways, and tertiary highways are staying the same. That’s good news to me… I grew up riding on secondary highways 552 and 556. But as for the King’s highways down south… It’s the end of the road.

Jon Upton : The Back Bumper

Source: TRAFFIC JAM: The Back Bumper – Ontario License Plates

What do you see Outside your Window?

What’s Out Your Window? – I’m not looking out a window from a highrise building. I have, in the past. But these days I’m in a one storey house. I can still see snow outside but the roads are clear from the snowploughs and the sunshine we had all day today. It’s after midnight now so outside it is quiet, dark and a bit mysterious. I can see everything from the streetlight at the bottom of my driveway.

Share your photos and stories with the Highrise – What’s Outside your Window project.

Biker Chic

Have you ever thought of yourself as a biker chick? The things you would do, the adventures you could have? The leather outfits? The open roads? The power of riding a big machine? I have. I would be surprised if there is a woman who hasn’t thought about being a biker chick, even just to herself, secretly.  It sounds fun, free and a real break from the regular life of being a good woman, daughter, Mother and all the other roles we taken on every day.

Get a vision of yourself as a biker chick. See the life you lead and then write about it. Develop the character. Give her a background, different from your own. Bring the character of the biker chick to life.

Does your biker chick have a touch of Mad Max, something of the science fiction/ distopia/ apocalypse theme? Mine does. She’s a survivor of more than just her personal past.

I started thinking about biker chicks today after looking at a link to Garage Party, which has a contest for a biker chic make over.

Pink Biker Chic – The world is full of ways to shift into gear and align yourself with your own truth. The Pink Biker Chic programs are the GPS for feminine transformation.  We take women from heels to wheels and help them take control of the handlebars of their own life, value who they are and walk in their authentic power through the Power of PINK.

Old House Quote from Calpurnius

Sometimes you read something on another blog that you could have written yourself. It’s a good thing that the world has so many different people in it who can think or feel the same way.

“I have a nasty habit of traveling roads left to themselves. As I came around a curve, I saw this house on its hill. Empty. Abandoned. The windows as dark as soulless eyes. I stood there in the overgrown driveway for what seemed like a lifetime as I debated going further. Something compelled me to move; something compelled me to stay. In that I found myself trapped like the house.”

From Calpurnius.com

I read this a couple of days ago but have been traveling a lot this week and have not had time to catch up here. This week I have been as far north as Sturgeon Falls and North Bay and as far south as the heart of downtown Toronto. (Drove through the Exhibition grounds and under the CN Tower).