I think this generally has to do with the geological conditions of much of northern Ontario. Along the northshore of both Lake Superior and Lake Huron, there is shallow bedrock, and very little clay on the topsoil that does exist. Many sections of both Hwy 11 and Hwy 69 are also built on blast rock.
While it does work for highway construction, the lack of a soil cover can pose problems when transport trucks run off the road and spill either their liquid cargo, or fuel. Because of the porous nature of the blast rock, recovery of the spilled fluid can pose problems.
I was actually wondering myself about this problem, as well as the possibility of subsidence due to meltwater percolating down, refreezing, and breaking larger stones into smaller ones that collectively take up less volume.
In regard to Terry Fox, I have found Mile 3,339 at last:
Mile 3,339 signs on Hwy. 17 (actual monument, and tourist inspecting it, just off north side of the road, to the left)The StreetView imagery dates from 2012, when this part of Hwy. 17 was still in the process of being twinned through the addition of a new carriageway on the north side (preliminary site clearance is evident as thinned forest cover on that side). The 2012 signs have the runner-in-circle symbol on white and state explicitly that this site is where the Marathon of Hope ended. I don't think the current signs carbon-copy them; I do remember clearly that they have the runner-in-circle on blue, and I think they were also square in format and said just "Mile 3,339."
MTO's plan to remove the wooden monument to the left (as part of the twinning works) evidently caused much heartache locally in 2011. It was eventually donated to a museum to complement other Terry Fox memorabilia in its collection. (Sources:
1,
2,
3,
4.)
There's a lot of shipping between cities on the Lakes. Chicago and Detroit, for example, are destinations for iron ore mined in the Mesabi and Marquette Ranges, with the former shipped out of Duluth. Then we do get salties that come in/go out the Seaway.
That and the Erie Canal became irrelevant with the opening of the St Lawrence Seaway. Lake freight traffic is quite substantial.
There is an exhibit panel at the Soo Locks visitor center in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, which gives the comparative unit energy costs of shipping loads by lake freighter, railroad, and highway. I wish I had photographed it, but I recall that the cost by freighter was a small fraction of that by rail, which in turn is somewhat smaller than highway.
Lake Superior navigation shuts down from mid-January to late March, so I suspect rail freight picks up some of the demand for bulk transport during those months. Most of the small towns on the north side of Lake Superior actually got their start as Canadian Pacific Railway towns--in 1930, there was no long-distance motorable road anywhere from about Harmony Beach (a few dozen miles north of Soo) to what is now Thunder Bay, and the last link of Hwy. 17 through Lake Superior Provincial Park was apparently also the final link of the Trans-Canada to be completed (works begun 1957, road opened September 1960).
The Soo Locks can handle lakers of up to 1000 feet, but I understand shipping companies now favor Seawaymax for new construction for flexibility. The one ship I saw actually going through the locks (the Canadian-registered lake freighter
Thunder Bay) is Seaway-capable.
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Topic: Ontario's Highways (Read 410907 times)