King's Highway 2, commonly referred to as Highway 2, is the lowest-numbered provincially maintained highway in the Canadian province of Ontario, and was originally part of a series of identically numbered highways which started in Windsor, stretched through Quebec and New Brunswick, and ended in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Prior to the 1990s, Highway 2 travelled through many of the major cities in Southern Ontario, including Windsor, Chatham, London, Brantford, Hamilton, Burlington, Mississauga, Toronto, Oshawa, Belleville, Kingston and Cornwall, and many other smaller towns and communities.
A former portion of Highway 2 in Lennox and Addington County cosigned as the Heritage Highway
An unremoved Highway 2 reassurance marker in Toronto
Kingston Road sign
A painting of Kingston Road east of Toronto in the 1830s.
Ontario Provincial Highway Network
The Provincial Highway Network consists of all the roads in Ontario maintained by the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario (MTO), including those designated as part of the King's Highway, secondary highways, and tertiary roads. Components of the system—comprising 16,900 kilometres (10,500 mi) of roads and 2,880 bridges
—range in scale from Highway 401, the busiest highway in North America, to unpaved forestry and mining access roads. The longest highway is nearly 2,000 kilometres (1,200 mi) long, while the shortest is less than a kilometre. Some roads are unsigned highways, lacking signage to indicate their maintenance by the MTO; these may be remnants of highways that are still under provincial control whose designations were decommissioned, roadway segments left over from realignment projects, or proposed highway corridors.
This marker assembly at an intersection with Highway 6 features junction crowns and trailblazer shields directing traffic to several highways, and illustrates the increasingly common use of shields in junction assemblies; the colours on the QEW arrow plate are inverted
Reassurance markers for the QEW and Highway 403 concurrency
A typical secondary highway with route marker
A Trans-Canada Highway marker mounted under a Highway 400 shield (left), with the TCH departing the 400 to follow Highway 12 (right)