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James Bow Busts Yonge Street Myth

By Ron Nurwisah, Boy Reporter

2006_7_26yonge.jpg
Writer and transit nut James Bow has disproven a cherished Toronto myth, that Yonge Street is the longest street in the world.

It was a tourist touchstone for Toronto that its main commercial strip, running up the centre of the city from Lake Ontario to the northern boundary and beyond, was the longest street in the world. The world record entry stood alongside the CN Tower’s title as the world’s tallest freestanding structure, and most people never questioned it. Yonge Street, we claimed, ran all the way into Northern Ontario before curving west to Thunder Bay and Kenora, before ending (1896 kilometres later) at the Minnesota border near Rainy River.

After some research Bow concludes that Yonge street actually turns into Highway 11 and thus not the same street. Also he argues that streets are slightly different than highways, which aren’t livable and would allow for the inclusion of the US extensive highway system to challenge for the title of world’s longest street.
So how long is Yonge? 56 km according to Bow’s calculations and he’ll be driving up the length of the road. Stay tuned for more.

Comments

  • http://www.publicspace.ca/sidewalksale.htm Jonathan

    Huh. I dug out my old (and very dusty) 1998 edition of The Guinness Book of Records and sure enough it has the folowing:
    The world’s longest street is Yonge Street, Toronto, Canada. Its length, now extended to Rainy River on the Ontario-Minnesota border, is 1896.3 km (1178 miles 528 yd).
    Oddly enough, I can find no information about this record on the Guinness website, even though it displays information about the record that appears immediately above it in the book (about the world’s longest “motorable road,” the Pan-American Highway).

  • Michael

    That’s like saying Avenue Rd and University Ave are different streets. So pedantic.

  • JGEP

    It’s nothing like University/Avenue.
    Take a look at a google map of Bradford.
    Younge/Highway 11 makes a magical right hand turn there. Yet is still supposed to be the same street?

  • Marc

    The question is, is it called Yonge street in any other city in Ontario? As in, how far north until people stop calling it Yonge street?
    Ah well…it was a nice story while it lasted.

  • Michael

    Ok, how about Dufferin Street which stops, starts, and shifts position, in at least three places. It’s still the same road.

  • http://brokenengine.blogspot.com brokenengine

    I’m from that neck of the woods(Holland Landing, near Bradford). Yonge becomes HWY 11(which, by the way, is just a normal road, and only paved within the last decade. People live on it, not sure where your “People don’t live on HWY’s” bit came from), which further north becomes Yonge, and again HWY 11, and again Yonge. It curves around the lake in Barrie, DISAPPEARS, pops up again on the other side of Barrie, etc etc etc. But the residents of Northern Ontario seem to have, for years, agreed that there is this interconnecting street that is Yonge Street, even though it jumps all over the map and changes names from time to time.
    Strange, but true.

  • Michael

    Its just typical Toronto, Centre of the Universe-ism. The road is called HWY 11 throughout. So if you want to be specific, “Hwy 11 is the longest street in the world”. Technically, a highway in Ontario is any roadway. What we tend to call highways (like the 401) are actually “freeways”. Now I’ve become the pedant. Thanks a lot.

  • rek

    Napanee has a road in the southeast with appellations over the course of a few kilometres. Palace Road, River Road, Hwy 9 and Hwy 5. No breaks, no jogs, just one continuous road. So if we want to call Hwy 11 Yonge Street within the city limits, but it’s Hwy 11 the whole way, what’s the problem?
    Is the Nile called the Nile its whole length (or lengths, where they meet), by everyone who lives near it?

  • http://www.bowjamesbow.ca/ James Bow

    The most telling problem with the claim, which I explain in the article, is that in Bradford, not only does Highway 11 lose the name “Yonge Street” (it becomes Bridge Street at the Holland River), but it changes its name again to Holland Street, and then takes a right turn at Barrie Street. This street resumes the Yonge Street name north of the Bradford city limits.
    Whatever you say about the Highway 11 designation, or the renaming of Yonge Street as Bridge Street, the turn onto Barrie Street means that Highway 11 is no longer following Yonge Street. And as if that wasn’t enough, the second Yonge Street ends at a T-intersection in the south of Barrie, and I can’t find it again no matter how far north I follow Highway 11.
    As I say in the article, I’m happy to celebrate the length of Highway 11, but that’s a highway designation, and that’s different from a street. So, I’m left to wonder, what *is* the longest street in the world? Where can we pick a non-expressway road, start at one end, and drive without turning at intersections until the other? Since Yonge Street is out of the equation, what else is there?
    I’ve measured the road that Dundas street is on as over 100 km, but that’s another exploration for another date.
    Thank you for the link. I hope you all enjoy the multi-part article as it unfolds over the next couple of weeks.

  • http://brokenengine.blogspot.com brokenengine

    Just for your info, I think the right hand turn is because the road ACTUALLY curved to the right at that point, before the 400 was extended that far north, causing them to continue the concession out to the West. I could be wrong though.
    Wow. Municipal roadway name blogs. How nerdy.

  • http://brokenengine.blogspot.com brokenengine

    PS: But interesting. I’ll have to read that article, when I get the chance

  • http://htt://www.bethmaher.com beth maher

    I’m pretty sure that it is considered to all be one long street, because historically it has long functioned as a trail from the north down to the banks of Lake Ontario.
    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/series/yonge/history.html

  • Jonathan Cooper

    I think Dundas Street is probably the longest, since it starts in the beaches and continues west as Dundas Street until Waterdown.

  • Jonathan Cooper

    Also, route 2 may be the longest continuous signed non-highway, stretching from Windsor to the Quebec border. However, it includes several turns so it wouldn’t qualify as the longest “non-expressway” road.
    The longest stretch of straight-driving I can find is Highway 17 from Sault Ste. Marie to Thunder Bay at 697Km.

  • hey

    On this, and so much else, JB is the victim of a cranial-rectal impaction. Does James deny the existence of a continuous Hwy 8? Hwy 10? 19th Ave in Markham? Elgin Mills in Markham and Vaughan? Avenue Rd? Are all of these roads and highways actually many separate roads and highways that have similar names? Can a resetting of the road mean that it ceases to exist as a continuous entity?
    But what do you expect from someone who believes in the supremacy of the streetcar against all empirical evidence? Never trust a TTC expert who lives in the Tri-Cities area.

  • http://www.bartvb.org Bart B. Van Bockstaele

    It is fairly simple. If you follow Yonge Street starting at Lake Ontario, and follow a more or less “logical flow”, Yonge Street is unbroken. Yes, it changes names. Yes, it takes a sharp turn once in while, and yes, you sometimes have the impression to simply turn on another street. I submit that is the consequence of minor changes over time but that Yonge Street is essentially unbroken. When you look on a map without too much detail, it is all fairly obvious.
    That said, I have followed Yonge Street with my bicycle and have taken pictures at every starting point and ending point except for the Barrie part. I am planning that for this week, if I can make the time, although it is essentially a non-issue over there. So far, I have identified six different Yonge Streets that are very clearly related to each other.
    My conclusion is that in the strictest current sense, the current Yonge Street stops in Bradford where it changes its name to Bridge Street at the bridge over the Holland River.
    In the strictest historic sense, Yonge Street ends just a bit past a golf course a bit further North although you have to jog along another road for a while to find it. It ends in a swamp. I know, I got stuck in it. The mosquitoes drove me back. Yet, Yonge Street continues just a bit North from there, but it is purely an agricultural road at that point.
    There is also a little piece of 144 metres long and that, although it seems a logical part of Yonge Street, is essentially a side street of Doane Road.
    I have all the traces on GPS, except for the first few kilometers because the GPS has trouble finding satellites downtown Toronto. I should have more change when the temperature cools a bit and the smog diminishes.
    I see it all as a non-issue that is a lot of fun to make into one.

  • http://www.bartvb.org Bart B. Van Bockstaele

    Obviously, change is a typo. It is supposed to be “chance” or “luck”!

  • http://www.bartvb.org Bart B. Van Bockstaele

    I have followed Yonge Street through Bradford and Barrie to the Crown Hill ramp of the modern-day highway 11 this weekend. I have taken pictures of every relevant point along the route. It is fairly obvious to me that we are dealing with a historic route that has been changed a bit over time, but that Yonge Street is essentially unbroken and can still be easily followed.
    While James Bow is correct when he says that Yonge Street is not all that long, as long as one demands that a street has the same name throughout, I submit that this demand is utter nonsense. College Street and Carlton Street in downtown Toronto are simply two names for different parts of what is obviously the same street. I do not think that many people in Toronto would insist that these are two streets instead of two different stretches of just one.
    We simply have to accept that streets are not constants, they change, they move over the years. If we do not accept that, then Yonge Street does not even leave Toronto since even the parts Bow accepts as part of Yonge Street are later additions and/or modifications.
    Regarding sharp turns, these are simply changes that have been applied over time.
    As for the highway designation, highways in Ontario are nearly always streets/roads where people live. JB is mixing up highways and freeways. He is not the only one to do that, but that does not make it right.
    Also, I am not so happy with the claim that James Bow disproves that Yonge Street is the longest street in the world. This claim is incorrect. Other people have claimed that before him, and they are easy to find on the web. He is merely repeating what others have done before him, just as I have done it after them.
    What James Bow is doing can easily be done by an armchair traveller. All one needs to do is look at a good map.

  • http://www.bowjamesbow.ca/ James Bow

    Yes, I believe we are looking at different classifications of streets. It’s clear that, historically, Yonge Street ran at least from Toronto to Barrie, near the route you took, and it’s also clear that things have changed since then. Actually, the original road that Yonge Street was a part of went all the way to Penetanguishene, though the leg from Barrie to Penetanguishene was never referred to as “Yonge Street” but as the Penetanguishene Road. Likewise, when the roadway was extended to North Bay and Cochrane in the 1920s, this section was referred to as “The Ferguson Highway” after the premier of the province at that time. The Highway 11 desigation comes in the 1930s.
    I still have my doubts about making Yonge Street synonymous with Highway 11, since the Yonge Street name was never applied to the road north of Barrie, but I have no problem with celebrating the history and the length of the old Highway 11 route, just as I have no problem celebrating other major routes, like the Lincoln trail or Route 66.
    You raise a good point about streets changing over time, and to me that raises a question: if Yonge Street takes all of these liberties to make its claim, then what is the longest “perfect street” out there? What is the longest unbroken road?
    Already, I’ve found that Airport Road runs as a perfect street (no bends at intersections, name applied throughout) from the Mississauga border to the community of Stayner, for 80 km — longer than the perfect sections of Yonge. As an unbroken road, taking in Scarlett, Dixon, Airport, King, Highway 26, Lakeshore and Hume, this street runs over 120 km from Toronto to Collingwood – quite a trip that I’ve resolved to take before the year is out.
    There are bound to be longer perfect streets and unbroken roads out there, waiting to be discovered. I’m interested in discovering them. Anybody else?