King's Highway2, commonly referred to as Highway2, 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, Highway2 travelled through many of the major cities in Southern Ontario, including Windsor, Chatham, London, Brantford, Hamilton, Burlington, Mississauga, Toronto, Oshawa, Belleville, Kingston and Cornwall, amongst many other smaller towns and communities. Once the primary east–west route across the southern portion of Ontario, most of Highway2 was bypassed by Highway 401, which was completed in 1968. The August 1997 completion of Highway 403 bypassed one final section through Brantford. Virtually all of the length of Highway2 was deemed a local route and removed from the provincial highway system by January1, 1998, with the exception of a section east of Gananoque. The entire route remains driveable, but as County Road2 or County Highway2 in most regions. In Toronto, former sections of the route are now Lake Shore Boulevard and Kingston Road. Portions of what became Highway2 served as early settlement trails, post roads and stagecoach routes. While the arrival of the railroad in the mid-19th century diminished the importance of the route, the advent of the bicycle and later the automobile renewed interest in roadbuilding. A segment of Highway2 between Pickering and Port Hope was the first section of roadway assumed by the newly-formed Department of Public Highways (DPHO) on August21, 1917. By the end of 1920, the department had taken over roads connecting Windsor with the Quebec boundary at Rivière-Beaudette, which it would number as Provincial Highway2 in the summer of 1925. In 1930, the DPHO was renamed the Department of Highways (DHO), and provincial highways became King's Highways. By this time, it was one of the dominant transportation arteries across southern Ontario and was long. The section of Highway2 between Hamilton and Toronto along Lakeshore Road became the first paved intercity road in Ontario in 1914. Beginning in the mid-1930s, the DHO began reconstructing several portions of the highway into the new German-inspired "dual highway", including east from Scarborough along Kingston Road. This would be the progenitor to Highway401, which was built in a patchwork fashion across Southern Ontario throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, often as bypass of and parallel to Highway2 (except between Woodstock and Toronto). Conversely,