Ontario

Northern Ontario covers a staggering 800,000 square kilometres. Most of it has no roads at all. The communities that exist in this vast boreal zone — Hearst, Kapuskasing, Cochrane, Timmins — are connected by a handful of provincial highways that traverse some of the emptiest terrain in eastern North America. Among these, Highway 11 is the primary corridor, and the section between Hearst and Kapuskasing — roughly 100 kilometres of two-lane highway through the Clay Belt — represents the corridor at its most exposed.

The Queen Elizabeth Way — the QEW — is the primary expressway connecting Toronto, the western Greater Toronto Area, Hamilton, and the Niagara region. It is one of the busiest commercial vehicle corridors in Ontario, carrying massive freight volumes between Toronto’s distribution infrastructure and the US border at Niagara Falls and Fort Erie. Somewhere near the middle of this corridor, between the cities of Burlington and Hamilton, sits a structure that concentrates the QEW’s inherent dangers into their most intense form: the Burlington Skyway.

Northwestern Ontario is one of the most sparsely populated regions in Canada. The vast boreal forest between the Manitoba border and Thunder Bay is crossed by a thin ribbon of highway — Highway 17, the main surface route through the region and part of the Trans-Canada Highway system. The approximately 200-kilometre section between Kenora and Dryden distills everything that makes northern Ontario highway driving difficult: long distances, no services, dense wildlife, severe winters, and the particular hazard of fatigue that sets in when hours pass with no town, no fuel stop, and no change in scenery.

Highway 401 through southern Ontario is, by vehicle count, the busiest highway in North America — and arguably the world. At its widest point through Toronto, the 401 carries over 400,000 vehicles per day across up to 18 lanes of traffic. For commercial truck drivers, this corridor is the backbone of Canadian freight: virtually all goods moving between Windsor (and the US border at Detroit), Toronto, Montreal, and the Maritime provinces travel this route.