The "mile Zero" Concept
Although there does not appear to be any nationally sanctioned "starting point" for the entire Trans-Canada Highway system, St. John's has adopted this designation for the section of highway running in the city by using the term "Mile One" for its sports stadium and convention centre complex, Mile One Centre. Likewise, the Victoria terminus of the Trans-Canada Highway, located at the foot of Douglas Street and Dallas Road at Beacon Hill Park, is marked by a "mile zero" monument. The Trans-Canada Highway has been posted in kilometres since 1977, when all Canadian roads switched to metric.
Although Highway 4 was commissioned in 1953 and is technically not part of the Trans-Canada Highway system, there is also a sign marking the Pacific terminus of the Trans-Canada Highway at Tofino, British Columbia, where Highway 4 terminates in the west, but it was most likely erected before 1953. Tofino was a strong proponent of a Trans-Canada Highway since the 1920s, when the only roads in the area were gravel, recognizing the need for tourism. The community was bypassed by the official Trans-Canada Highway in the 1950s, when government prioritized the connection of major communities in its budgets, choosing instead to connect Nanaimo with Victoria.
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Famous quotes containing the words mile and/or concept:
“I have got enough of the old masters! Brown says he has “shook” them, and I think I will shake them, too. You wander through a mile of picture galleries and stare stupidly at ghastly old nightmares done in lampblack and lightning, and listen to the ecstatic encomiums of the guides, and try to get up some enthusiasm, but it won’t come.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“To find the length of an object, we have to perform certain
physical operations. The concept of length is therefore fixed when the operations by which length is measured are fixed: that is, the concept of length involves as much as and nothing more than the set of operations by which length is determined.”
—Percy W. Bridgman (1882–1961)