page_title: London, Ontario
section_title: Road transportation
hierarchical_section_title: London, Ontario / Transportation / Road transportation
caption_attribution_description: English: Highway 401 seen from the Wellington Road overpass in London, Ontario, looking west towards the Highway 402 interchange.
context_page_description: London is a city in southwestern Ontario, Canada, along the Quebec City–Windsor Corridor. The city had a population of 383,822 according to the 2016 Canadian census. London is at the confluence of the Thames River, approximately 200 km from both Toronto and Detroit; and about 230 km from Buffalo, New York. The city of London is a separated municipality, politically separate from Middlesex County, though it remains the county seat.
  London and the Thames were named in 1793 by John Graves Simcoe, who proposed the site for the capital city of Upper Canada. The first European settlement was between 1801 and 1804 by Peter Hagerman. The village was founded in 1826 and incorporated in 1855. Since then, London has grown to be the largest southwestern Ontario municipality and Canada's 11th largest metropolitan area, having annexed many of the smaller communities that surrounded it.
  London is a regional centre of healthcare and education, being home to the University of Western Ontario, Fanshawe College, and several hospitals.
context_section_description: London is at the junction of Highway 401 that connects the city to Toronto and Windsor, and Highway 402 to Sarnia. Also, Highway 403, which diverges from the 401 at nearby Woodstock, provides ready access to Brantford, Hamilton, and the Niagara Peninsula. Many smaller two-lane highways also pass through or near London, including Kings Highways 2, 3, 4, 7 and 22. Some of these are no longer highways, as provincial downloading in the 1980s and 1990s put responsibility for most provincial highways on municipal governments. Nevertheless, these roads continue to provide access from London to nearby communities and locations in much of Western Ontario, including Goderich, Port Stanley and Owen Sound.
  Since the 1970s, London has improved urban road alignments that eliminated "jogs" in established traffic patterns over 19th-century street misalignments. The lack of freeways directly through the city as well as the presence of two significant railways (each with attendant switching yards and few over/underpasses) are the primary causes of rush hour congestion, along with construction and heavy snow. Thus, traffic times can be significantly variable, although major traffic jams are rare. Wellington Road between Commissioners Road E and Southdale Road E is London's busiest section of roadway, with more than 46,000 vehicles using the span on an average day City council rejected early plans for the construction of a freeway, and instead accepted the Veterans Memorial Parkway to serve the east end. Some Londoners have expressed concern the absence of a local freeway may hinder London's economic and population growth, while others have voiced concern such a freeway would destroy environmentally sensitive areas and contribute to London's suburban sprawl. Road capacity improvements have been made to Veterans Memorial Parkway (formerly named Airport Road and Highway 100) in the industrialized east end. However, the Parkway has received criticism for not being built as a proper highway; a recent city-run study suggested upgrading it by replacing the intersections with interchanges.
caption: Highway 401 in London looking towards Highway 402 from Wellington Road
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