The National Highway System (french: Réseau routier national) in

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is a federal designation for a strategic

transport network A transport network, or transportation network, is a network or graph in geographic space, describing an infrastructure that permits and constrains movement or flow. Examples include but are not limited to road networks, railways, air routes, ...

highway A highway is any public or private road or other public way on land. It is used for major roads, but also includes other public roads and public tracks. In some areas of the United States, it is used as an equivalent term to controlled-access ...

s and

freeway A controlled-access highway is a type of highway that has been designed for high-speed vehicular traffic, with all traffic flow—ingress and egress—regulated. Common English terms are freeway, motorway and expressway. Other similar terms ...

s. The system includes but is not limited to the

Trans-Canada Highway The Trans-Canada Highway ( French: ; abbreviated as the TCH or T-Can) is a transcontinental federal–provincial highway system that travels through all ten provinces of Canada, from the Pacific Ocean on the west coast to the Atlantic Ocean o ...

, and currently consists of of roadway designated under one of three classes: Core Routes, Feeder Routes, and Northern and Remote Routes. The

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maintains very little power or authority over the maintenance or expansion of the system beyond sharing part of the cost of economically significant projects within the network. Highways within the system are not given any special signage, except where they are part of a Trans-Canada Highway route.

History

The system was first designated in 1988 by the Federal/Provincial/Territorial Council of Ministers Responsible for Transportation and Highway Safety, a council consisting of the federal, provincial and territorial Ministers of Transport. A total of of highway were originally designated as part of the system. Highways selected for the system were existing primary routes that supported interprovincial and international trade and travel, by connecting major population or commercial centres with each other, with major border crossings on the

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, or with other transport hubs. The system was further expanded in 2004, with the addition of approximately of highway that was not part of the original 1988 network. It was in this era that the current "core", "feeder" and "northern or remote" classes of route were established. Not all highways within the system are designated in their entirety, but may instead be part of the system over only part of their length; a few highways even have two or more discontinuous segments designated as part of the system. In some locations, the National Highway System may also incorporate city arterial streets to connect highway routes which are part of the system but do not directly interconnect, or to link the system to an important

intermodal transport Intermodal transport (or intermodal transportation) involves the use of more than one mode of transport for a journey. It may refer to: * Intermodal passenger transport * Intermodal freight transport See also * Intermodal transportation center ...

hub—such as a shipping

port A port is a maritime facility comprising one or more wharves or loading areas, where ships load and discharge cargo and passengers. Although usually situated on a sea coast or estuary, ports can also be found far inland, such as Ham ...

, a

railway terminal A train station, railway station, railroad station or depot is a railway facility where trains stop to load or unload passengers, freight or both. It generally consists of at least one platform, one track and a station building providing such ...

, an

airport An airport is an aerodrome with extended facilities, mostly for commercial air transport. Airports usually consists of a landing area, which comprises an aerially accessible open space including at least one operationally active surface ...

or a

ferry terminal A passenger terminal is a structure in a port which services passengers boarding and leaving water vessels such as ferries, cruise ships and ocean liners. Depending on the types of vessels serviced by the terminal, it may be named (for example) ...

—which is not directly located on a provincial-class highway. Routes within the system continue to be maintained, funded and signed as provincial, rather than federal, highways. However, the federal government provides some funding assistance for important maintenance and expansion projects on designated highways through

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programs. For instance, several recent maintenance projects on National Highway System routes in

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were partly funded under the federal government's Building Canada Fund–Major Infrastructure Component, while several four-laning projects in Ontario in the 2000s accessed federal funding under the Strategic Highway Infrastructure Program. There is no single, ongoing program for federal contributions to the National Highway System; rather, these contributions have been made through a variety of separate infrastructure investment programs of defined length and scope. Recent transportation planning proposals have identified public-private partnerships and dedicated

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es as possible mechanisms for providing more stable funding, although no comprehensive program has been implemented to date. The National Highway System has been criticized for lacking a truly comprehensive expansion plan. In many parts of the country, the system relies on two-lane highways, or expressways which are not fully up to international

standards; according to

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economics professor Livio di Matteo, many parts of the system, even on the main Trans-Canada Highway portion of the network, still leave "the nation's east-west flow of personal and commercial traffic subject to the whims of an errant moose". Some motorists, further, prefer to drive between Western Canada and Eastern Canada by travelling through the United States rather than on Canadian highways; even though this represents a slightly longer trip than the Trans-Canada Highway route, it frequently takes a shorter amount of time due to the US Interstate system's higher speed limits, increased lane capacity, higher number of alternative routes, and reduced likelihood of being delayed by a road accident. American transportation planning academic

Wendell Cox Wendell Cox is an American urban policy analyst and proponent of the use of the private car over rail projects. He is the principal and sole owner of Wendell Cox Consultancy/Demographia, based in the St. Louis metropolitan region and editor of thre ...

has also identified improvements to the system, so that Canada would have a comprehensive national freeway network comparable to the American

Interstate Highway System The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, commonly known as the Interstate Highway System, is a network of controlled-access highways that forms part of the National Highway System in the United States. Th ...

, as an economically critical project for the country to undertake in the 21st century.

Routes

In its current form, the National Highway System includes routes in all Canadian provinces and territories except

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, which has no conventional road connections to any other Canadian province or territory. Officially the system maintains three classifications of road: Core, Feeder and Northern/Remote. Within the core and feeder classes, the system's official register made additional distinctions between conventional core or feeder routes and intermodal links or "anomalies", where a highway that does not meet the normal criteria for inclusion, or a municipal arterial road, has been adopted into the system to fill in a gap in the network. The "intermodal" and "anomaly" classes are not distinct designations, however, but simply represent an additional clarification of why the road holds "core" or "feeder" status. Since 2016, the "anomaly" category has been dropped and the road is simply included in the specific list. The tables below do not include "intermodal" municipal streets which connect major highways to intermodal facilities. Note that some highways listed here may be designated as part of the National Highway System over only a portion of their total length, rather than over the whole highway. Termini listed below are those of a highway's NHS designation only, and may not necessarily always correspond to the termini of the highway as a whole.