adma
Superstar
Well, not to the same degree, (and I never implied it was to the same degree) because unlike Hurontario/10 in Mississauga, Yonge/11 in Toronto never was exactly rural--at least, not in the King's Highway era. But as long as it was the red line on the map marked "11", Yonge carried a "highwayness", anyway--and it was that beginning-of-Highway-11-ness which, of course, motivated the "Longest Street In The World" bumf. If Yonge weren't Highway 11 (and intuitively "known as such" by the public) in the first place, the tourist shills wouldn't have created that mythology.
Ultimately, it all depends where you set the "popular nomenclature" bar; just because people referred to Yonge as "Yonge" and not as "11" (at least, not south of the 401, or Steeles, or wherever God's Country as opposed to the Big City officially began at whatever moment), doesn't mean they were oblivious to its being 11. It isn't a black-or-white highway-versus street thing: there are shades of grey. And as long as commonly used road maps and city street maps existed that depicted Yonge as a red line with an "11" shield, people knew. Period. Yeah, maybe not all people were so engaged; but it's not like there isn't a whole slew of other "if you're a true Torontonian, you have to know this" things that a lot of Torontonians weren't and aren't aware of, either. Look: there's a "mediocre majority" for everything.
All you're betraying is that you either (a) weren't around, at least in an actively map-using-and-consuming form, when the most commonly used Ontario and Toronto maps showed Yonge as that red line marked "11"; or (b) have a perspective on what is or isn't a "highway" that's even more uninspiredly, ahistorically functionalistic than Coruscanti's.
