Lost Road and Bridge: Lawrence Avenue

[adma]

Steeles is another township line, so few roads except Yonge and Hurontario, meets perfectly.

And even Yonge's imperfect (think of the bend N of St Clair)

 

[Lone Primate]

Someone posted ground-level shots of the Golden Mile area a year or two ago in a "guess the intersection" game.

Hmph, "guess the intersection" is a game I find myself playing a lot in some parts of Toronto. What's with the intersections where they put the street name signs facing out? If you're not in a part of town you're familiar with and you wind up the first or second car at the light, you find yourself facing the blank backs of four aluminum panels with no way to know what cross street you're at. Signs that face into the intersection are visible to everybody. You'd think they'd have established that as a standard by now.

 

[Lone Primate]

There was never any such connection, or at least never any such "old route"--that funny street underneath the Sheppard bridge was always a cul-de-sac.

That's a great walk. I was surprised but kind of pleased to discover that before they built the current bridge in the 1960s, that Don River Blvd. there used to meet Sheppard Avenue at grade. And I think Adma's right; I have the impression Don Valley Blvd. (or whatever it was called at the time) used to end at the Hinder estate. It's even possible it was originally just their driveway.

 

[Lone Primate]

Within townships, there's jogs as well due to error. This is likely what explains the jogs at Finch. In Peel County, which used a "double-front" survey (resulting in EHS and WHS lines), the jogs are between the line roads in the concessions (look at Old School Road in Caledon)

Those aren't due to errors; in fact, they're a nod to just how precise the surveying method actually is. Jogs in north-south concession lines are almost always due to the curvature of the Earth. Lines of latitude (east-west) are always parallel to one another and the equator, so they don't have this problem (adjustments in range roads are usually due to moving from one survey system to another). But lines of longitude converge at the poles. They're furthest apart at the equator, but draw ever closer together as they approach the poles.

Imagine Yonge or Hurontario as something like our own personal prime meridians. They never waver, since they set the standard. But roads like Kennedy and Dixie and Jane and the like that are based on Yonge and Hurontario all eventually converge with them at some point on the globe (either the real north pole or an imaginary pole, depending on what direction the original surveyed road points). As a result, roads like Kennedy constantly, if subtly, draw nearer to roads like Yonge as they get further from the base line (like Eglinton). If that's not corrected for, then farmers progressively further from the base line will be getting plots of land that are smaller and smaller and smaller. To prevent this, concession lines have to be adjusted in their course every so often, usually at range roads like Finch, Lawrence, Steeles, etc., and you'll typically notice that the further you get from the survey line, the wider, or else more frequent, the adjustments get. So they're not mistakes, they're deliberate readjustments to prevent settlers from getting less land than they're promised.

 

[Dan416]

I'll just point out that in Peel Region, Steeles isn't a boundary between Brampton and Mississauga (I'm not sure why not, though) and that could explain why there's no jogs there. The boundary between Mississauga and Brampton is somewhere between Steeles and Derry, approximately around Highway 407.

What kinda bugs me in Mississauga is the destruction of the grid sytem near where I live. For example, Second Line West used to go from Eglinton Ave through to Brampton where it became Chinguacousy. Then when the Mavis extension north was built it curved toward Chinguacousy at Steeles to meet right up with Chinguacousy. So Second Line was effed up there, and furthermore in a part of my subdivision the turned part of Second Line into a crescent and built homes on it (literally on it). If you look at a map you'll see that part of Culmore Crescent used to be Second Line W.

Furthermore, Creditview Road was never very straight and jogs several times, but they worsened the situation by making it connect with "Meadowvale Road" at Derry and never again reaching Creditview which continues on through Churchville in Brampton and further on. So now there's an intersection in Old Meadowvale where Old Creditview Rd and Old Derry Rd meet, though they both were the original Creditview and Derry Roads.

*end rant* ... sorry this is somewhat off topic, but I didn't want to create a new thread for it.

 

[adma]

I'll just point out that in Peel Region, Steeles isn't a boundary between Brampton and Mississauga (I'm not sure why not, though) and that could explain why there's no jogs there. The boundary between Mississauga and Brampton is somewhere between Steeles and Derry, approximately around Highway 407.

Until Peel was regionalized in 1973, Steeles *was* the boundary between what had been Toronto and Chinguacousy Townships--likewise, Winston Churchill Blvd was originally the W boundary of Mississauga when it was nothing more than Toronto Township, renamed. (So it's worth noting that they *deliberately* used the projected 403/407 routes as new municipal boundaries.)

If you look closely, there are a few subtle jogs on Steeles--Dixie, Bramalea, etc; but they also exist on Burnhamthorpe, which was never a municipal boundary--and some of the most dramatic along the old Middle Road (i.e. the present-day QEW; think of Dixie, or the old 5th Line, now straightened-out/supplanted by the Erin Mills Parkway)

 

[Chuck]

Those aren't due to errors; in fact, they're a nod to just how precise the surveying method actually is. Jogs in north-south concession lines are almost always due to the curvature of the Earth. Lines of latitude (east-west) are always parallel to one another and the equator, so they don't have this problem (adjustments in range roads are usually due to moving from one survey system to another). But lines of longitude converge at the poles. They're furthest apart at the equator, but draw ever closer together as they approach the poles.

Imagine Yonge or Hurontario as something like our own personal prime meridians. They never waver, since they set the standard. But roads like Kennedy and Dixie and Jane and the like that are based on Yonge and Hurontario all eventually converge with them at some point on the globe (either the real north pole or an imaginary pole, depending on what direction the original surveyed road points). As a result, roads like Kennedy constantly, if subtly, draw nearer to roads like Yonge as they get further from the base line (like Eglinton). If that's not corrected for, then farmers progressively further from the base line will be getting plots of land that are smaller and smaller and smaller. To prevent this, concession lines have to be adjusted in their course every so often, usually at range roads like Finch, Lawrence, Steeles, etc., and you'll typically notice that the further you get from the survey line, the wider, or else more frequent, the adjustments get. So they're not mistakes, they're deliberate readjustments to prevent settlers from getting less land than they're promised.

That is incorrect from a surveying perspective. In order to reduce the margin of error, a fundamental principal of surveying is that you must start and finish at a known benchmark, and create intermediate stations along the way to complete the circuit. Our concession system grew box by box, rather than concession by concession. Because it is impossible to obtain 100% accuracy, dog legs resulted. Though the intention is for concessions to be 6600 feet apart (see last paragraph), one might be 6550 feet apart, another might be 6635 feet apart, and so on. Given the completely untamed landscape surveyors had to deal with, an error of 100 feet in 26400 feet (0.4%) shows the incredible surveying capability of those who laid out the present day GTA.

It is also incorrect from a geographical perspective, because a) Toronto's concessions do NOT run due north, south, east, and west, and b) the GTA can be considered "flat" due to it's miniscule size relative to the curvature of the earth. It is true that technically, corrections are required. But because surveying error is several orders of magnitude larger than this correction, it would be ridiculous to even calculate it.

And here is the see below. Toronto uses a 1000 acre concession system, in which each concession box contains 1000 acres, or ten 100-acre properties. In order to achieve this, our concessions are 100 "chains" apart. A chain is a surveying unit measuring exactly 66 feet, which means that 100 chains measure 6600 feet. Fast forward 200 years to the metric system, and purely by chance our arterial roads are 2 km apart (2.01 km to be exact).

 

[scarberiankhatru]

I still don't know why a road like Brimley managed to get a jog at every single concession north of St. Clair...I'm sure many(/most?) jogs are individual quirks.

Oh, and are the Manitoba/Saskatchewan border irregularities examples of said "corrections" or something else?

 

[Chuck]

I still don't know why a road like Brimley managed to get a jog at every single concession north of St. Clair...I'm sure many(/most?) jogs are individual quirks.

Like I said before, boxes. Concessions were not staked out 20 km at a time. If they were, mistakes would go unnoticed until the road is complete, and could cause the road to be off course by hundreds of feet. This is possibly the cause for the bend in Yonge St, which had to then be replicated in all other north south concessions north of Eglinton.

By surveying in closed routes (called traverses) there is no hidden error because if you made a mistake, your end point will not be the same as the start point (within reason) and you'll start over. Minor jogs of 50 feet would be a walk in the park compared to Bathurst and Yonge intersecting somewhere up in Aurora!

 

[scarberiankhatru]

The roads in Scarborough were laid out ~800m at a time so given the sheer number of surveyed lines going east/west, no wonder jogs are standard...it seems they could have eliminated jogs if their intention was a pure grid of roads, but then the regularity and acreage of properties might have suffered.

 

[Dan416]

Until Peel was regionalized in 1973, Steeles *was* the boundary between what had been Toronto and Chinguacousy Townships--likewise, Winston Churchill Blvd was originally the W boundary of Mississauga when it was nothing more than Toronto Township, renamed. (So it's worth noting that they *deliberately* used the projected 403/407 routes as new municipal boundaries.)

If you look closely, there are a few subtle jogs on Steeles--Dixie, Bramalea, etc; but they also exist on Burnhamthorpe, which was never a municipal boundary--and some of the most dramatic along the old Middle Road (i.e. the present-day QEW; think of Dixie, or the old 5th Line, now straightened-out/supplanted by the Erin Mills Parkway)

Interesting that they'd use projected highway routes as a boundary! Though Brampton and Mississauga will probably end up merging anyway.

 

[Tuscani01]

What kinda bugs me in Mississauga is the destruction of the grid sytem near where I live. For example, Second Line West used to go from Eglinton Ave through to Brampton where it became Chinguacousy. Then when the Mavis extension north was built it curved toward Chinguacousy at Steeles to meet right up with Chinguacousy. So Second Line was effed up there, and furthermore in a part of my subdivision the turned part of Second Line into a crescent and built homes on it (literally on it). If you look at a map you'll see that part of Culmore Crescent used to be Second Line W

I lived right at the corner of Second Line W. before they turned it into a crescent and built homes on it. The whole reason for the rerouting was to preserve the town. If old Derry Road was widened, it would mean destroying the buildings that run along side it. Derry road was rebuilt to bypass Meadowvale and Second Line was stopped to keep traffic away from Meadowvale. Mavis was built to handle the traffic that would normally use Second Line W. plus it relieved the pressure from the 401/Hurontario interchange.

I also remember a little girl my age who got run over by a car on Second Line. It was pretty dangerous because it was straight and houses fronted right onto it. (My house being one of them) Any traffic that still requires Second Line West must now use Ivandale, which crosses Second Line in the south, then re-meets with it in the North.

 

[Lone Primate]

I'll just point out that in Peel Region, Steeles isn't a boundary between Brampton and Mississauga (I'm not sure why not, though)

It was, until 1974.

The boundary between Mississauga and Brampton is somewhere between Steeles and Derry, approximately around Highway 407.

The boundary between the newly-created cities of Mississauga and Brampton was established at the hydro corridor running between them when Peel Region was inaugurated in 1974. But Steeles was once the north boundary of Toronto Township, which became the Town of Mississauga in 1968.

So now there's an intersection in Old Meadowvale where Old Creditview Rd and Old Derry Rd meet, though they both were the original Creditview and Derry Roads.

I can still remember when that was a signaled intersection. Today, it's calm enough that they govern it with stop signs.

 

[Lone Primate]

It is also incorrect from a geographical perspective, because a) Toronto's concessions do NOT run due north, south, east, and west, and b) the GTA can be considered "flat" due to it's miniscule size relative to the curvature of the earth. It is true that technically, corrections are required. But because surveying error is several orders of magnitude larger than this correction, it would be ridiculous to even calculate it.

Well, a couple of points here... the idea of the pole was meant to be illustrative, not literal. Anything can serve as a "pole", not just the actual axis of the earth. It could be "that lonesome pine there yonder on the horizon". The closer you are to it, the greater the variance is going to be as you approach it (if you WERE using the North Pole and surveying from 15 or 20 miles away from it, you can see that the convergences would become pronounced very quickly; that's the principle I was getting at). Nobody surveying farmland in southern Ontario would actually survey it using the North Pole as their fixed reference point. For one thing, the wouldn't be able to see it. You'd pick a terrain feature and survey relative to it. Since it's going to be in line of sight, the errors moving from range line to range line are going to be far greater than ones that would accrue if you actually could use the North Pole as a fixed reference point for 43 degrees and change north of the equator. That's why the jogs come so frequently, are so pronounced, and don't occur at exactly the same ratios in every survey (the distance to the geographical reference points aren't fixed). They're all pretty unique relative to each other.

 

[Lone Primate]

I lived right at the corner of Second Line W. before they turned it into a crescent and built homes on it. The whole reason for the rerouting was to preserve the town. If old Derry Road was widened, it would mean destroying the buildings that run along side it. Derry road was rebuilt to bypass Meadowvale and Second Line was stopped to keep traffic away from Meadowvale. Mavis was built to handle the traffic that would normally use Second Line W. plus it relieved the pressure from the 401/Hurontario interchange.

I think the folks in Meadowvale Village are probably happier with the way things turned out. I can hardly imagine they wanted Derry Road and Second Line six-laned through their village and carrying 80 km/h traffic. There was no need to do that, since there was still a lot of open land around that provided space for the new routes. So we got the best of both worlds... we got the wider streets Mississauga's infrastructure requires, and we preserved an important cultural and historic facet of the GTA. I think it was good planning all around, though I, too, get wistful about what was.