Roads: Fantasy Proposals

[11th]

The City of Toronto Archives "TTC - 100 Years of Moving Toronto" online exhibition is live, fyi. Worth a look, some good historic photos, fantastic detail in the writing. If they do ever open a TTC museum, you could copy and paste quite a lot of this!
Link here

Had a look at the 1921 and 1934 maps on the Route Maps page. Didn't know there were plans for multiple diagonal routes across the city/metro.
Some observations:
King Georges Drive, currently a small street around Keele/Eglinton; there was a section around Wilson and Bathurst (since gobbled up by the 401)
Hollaman Road, now a a stub around Glencairn/Bathurst, was to be a longer road.

Aside from that, York Mills and Wilson were called Twentieth Ave (ref. 1921 maps) and Ellesmere was... Wilson Ave (ref. 1934 map).

 

[Transportfan]

Had a look at the 1921 and 1934 maps on the Route Maps page. Didn't know there were plans for multiple diagonal routes across the city/metro.
Some observations:
King Georges Drive, currently a small street around Keele/Eglinton; there was a section around Wilson and Bathurst (since gobbled up by the 401)
Hollaman Road, now a a stub around Glencairn/Bathurst, was to be a longer road.

Aside from that, York Mills and Wilson were called Twentieth Ave (ref. 1921 maps) and Ellesmere was... Wilson Ave (ref. 1934 map).

Norseman St. in Etobicoke was (believe it or not) once a separate section of College St, as was Howard Park Ave.

It's funny how in York Region, many old road names and numbers were never changed, such as 16th Ave. never being designated "Carrville Rd. E", but 17th was changed to Major Mackenzie. Or Highway 7 not officially being divided at Yonge despite address numbers being so divided. Stranger still, the original section of Davis Dr. was not given an east designation after being extended west of Yonge after Hwy. 9 was downloaded to become Davis Dr. W. even though it crossed Yonge fully in Newmarket.

Metro Toronto had a designation system where streets that crossed Yonge had east-west designations even for the municipalities that didn't cross it. Metro wasn't a single city, but it did structure itself as such on many metrics.

 

[ShonTron]

Norseman St. in Etobicoke was (believe it or not) once a separate section of College St, as was Howard Park Ave.

Though the two streets would roughly line up if they were joined across High Park and the Humber River, I really don't see it. Etobicoke Township had a separate land survey and road layout from Toronto/York Township. Note how Bloor Street jogs at the Humber River, and how St. Clair doesn't cross, and how the part of Eglinton Avenue in Etobicoke was once called Richview Side Road and was joined to Eglinton Avenue in the 1950s.

If you have any evidence that shows a proposed connection, I'd love to see it.

 

[Transportfan]

Though the two streets would roughly line up if they were joined across High Park and the Humber River, I really don't see it. Etobicoke Township had a separate land survey and road layout from Toronto/York Township. Note how Bloor Street jogs at the Humber River, and how St. Clair doesn't cross, and how the part of Eglinton Avenue in Etobicoke was once called Richview Side Road and was joined to Eglinton Avenue in the 1950s.

The surveys were different, but the concessions did approximately line up across the Humber. Eglinton in Etobicoke was once Richview Side Road, but it was the rough match of Eglinton. Rathburn was the never-connected equivalent of St.Clair.

Now Peel really did have an incompatible survey, with the concessions staggered midpoint from each other across the Etobicoke Creek or Hwy. 50. That's why there's poor connectivity with Toronto's streets, such as Burnhamthorpe, which runs between the "typical" grid roads and oddly ends after a relatively short distance in Toronto. The streets that do connect and run across much of both cities are either non-concession (on both sides) colonization roads like Dundas or Lakeshore, or modern extensions like Bloor or Queensway. That's also the reason Major Mackenzie doesn't continue into Brampton, and Hwy. 7 left a long bypassed section (today called Ebenezer Rd.) as it was later linked at Hwy. 50.

Eglinton is an anomaly as its a concession across both cities, but even that's a result of the boundary leaving the Etobicoke Creek to follow it, allowing the former Lower Base Line to continue until it hit Richview Side Rd.

But there was one case where the grid did line up: At Steeles.

If you have any evidence that shows a proposed connection, I'd love to see it.

I never said there was ever a proposed connection, but Norseman was called College, the same way The Queensway was once a broken section of Queen St that was called Queen.

 

[Towered]

The surveys were different, but the concessions did approximately line up across the Humber. Eglinton in Etobicoke was once Richview Side Road, but it was the rough match of Eglinton. Rathburn was the never-connected equivalent of St.Clair.

I've actually wished that these two could be connected. There really are too many bottlenecks in the street grid in Etobicoke.

 

[Dan416]

I've actually wished that these two could be connected. There really are too many bottlenecks in the street grid in Etobicoke.

Even the Toronto Rathburn and Mississauga Rathburn never got a bridge to connect them.