County Highway - Canada

Canada

In Canada, numbered county roads are only found in Ontario, where they are similar to American county highways. Ontario county or regional roads are marked with trapezoid-shaped signs, usually (but not necessarily) with a white, green, or blue background, and normally identifying the county or region responsible for the road's maintenance, sometimes with the jurisdiction's coat of arms or corporate logo. The county road network has been present for many years, but has only been signed with the flowerpot logos since the 1970s and early 1980s (depending on the area). Previously, the roads simply had road names, such as "Essex Road 42" or "Kent County Road 14", and so on, but had no shields to designate them. Many Ontario county roads are built to provincial highway standards, as thousands of kilometres of highways were downloaded from the province to counties and regional municipalities in 1997 and 1998, and most of the downloaded highways were rolled into the county road systems. In some situations, these in turn were downloaded from the region/county to the local municipalities.

Not all jurisdictions in Ontario which maintain a county road system use the name "County Road" to designate them, however — depending on the type of census division which maintains them, they may also be designated as a Regional Road, Municipal Road, Regional/County Highway, District Road or City Road. In the unincorporated districts of Northern Ontario, as there is no county level of government the province maintains a secondary highway system to serve the same function.

In addition to county roads, many townships also have concession roads and township roads, such as Colchester South Road 3, and Concession 8. These usually do not have shields (only names on signs and maps). One exception is former Highway 620. It was downloaded to the Peterborough and Hastings County governments, and in one section, the highway was downloaded further to the township of Wollaston, and is now signed as "Wollaston Township 620", with a municipal sign similar to an Ontario Tertiary Highway. A number of townships in Wellington County sign their township road system in a similar manner.

• County/Regional roads in Ontario are styled by this basic "Flowerpot" design. This shield is of York Regional Road 8.

• Niagara Regional Road 20 shield. While Niagara generally conforms to the standard Ontario "flowerpot" design, the shields are white-on-blue rather than the more traditional black-on-white and have rounded corners.

• Essex County Road 22 Shield, a typical county road shield in Essex County, Ontario.