to Montreal, brought Route 2 onto Montreal Island. Provincial highway Ontario has published an official highway map since at least 1923, an era when many provincial highways were still gravel or unimproved road. To accommodate the passenger cars of the Roaring Twenties, efforts to pave Ontario's roads had begun in earnest. The 1926 Official Road Map of Ontario boasted the "Highway from Windsor to the Quebec border, via London will all be paved at the end of the present year" and "a person will then be able to travel over 700 miles of pavement without a detour". Twenty-five years after the first provincial road improvement efforts, Ontario maps boastfully listed fifteen king's highways (numbered 2-17, as 1 and 13 were never assigned) and a growing network of county roads. While thousands of miles of dirt and gravel road still remained throughout the system, the steel rails which crossed the region now had a credible rival in southern Ontario. Beginning in 1935, Highway Minister Thomas McQuesten applied the concept of a second roadway to several projects along Highway 2: a stretch west of Brockville, a stretch from Woodstock eastward, and a section between Birchmount Road to east of Morningside Avenue in Scarborough Township. When widening in Scarborough reached the Highland Creek ravine in 1936, east of Morningside, the Department of Highways began construction on a second bridge over the large valley (the original having been constructed as a bypass of the former alignment through West Hill in 1919). From here the highway was constructed on a new alignment to Oshawa, avoiding construction on the congested Highway 2. As grading and bridge construction neared completion between Highland Creek and Ritson Road in September 1939, World War II broke out and gradually money was siphoned from highway construction to the war effort. The wartime rationing of the 1940s soon gave way to the fifties neon era of growing prosperity, increased vehicle ownership and annual paid vacations. Service stations, diners, motels and tourist-related establishments were proliferating on long strips of highway such as Toronto's Lakeshore Boulevard and Kingston Road to accommodate the growing number of travellers. Increased traffic initially led to a construction boom, but soon the most congested sections were among the first candidates to be bypassed by freeway. By 1955, businesspeople along the north shore of Lake Erie were organising efforts to promote tourism on Highways 2 and 3, both of which