Trans-Canada Highway

The Trans-Canada Highway is a transcontinental highway system spanning Canada from the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland to the Pacific coast of British Columbia, built beginning in the 1950s under a federal-provincial cost-sharing program to give the country its first continuous paved road connection across its full width. It runs more than seven thousand kilometers through every Canadian province, crossing the Rocky Mountains, the Canadian Shield and the prairies, and remains the principal route for both long-distance freight trucking and cross-country travel within Canada. Its construction mirrored, on a much larger geographic span but a smaller population base, the same postwar push toward continuous paved and limited-access highway systems seen in the United States and Western Europe.