Why This Street In Toronto Was 'The Longest Street In The World' Until It Wasn't

I have lived in Toronto for 30 years and for pretty much all of that time (read: up until about six weeks ago), I believed something that many Canadians grew up learning as fact: Yonge Street is the longest street in the world. But as it turns out, that hasn't been true since 1999. In fact, it's possible that it was never true.

Legend previously had it that Yonge — dotted with landmarks, a major subway line, and arguably serving as the main north-south spinal artery in Toronto — traveled from its base right where Lake Ontario meets downtown all the way up 1,178 miles north (or 1,896 km), flirting with sub-Arctic territory, then west, ending at the Ontario-Minnesota border. It was in the Guinness Book of World Records and everything. But in 1999, that was revised because, in reality, Yonge became Highway 11 after about an hour north of the city, and for the record, the street has to have "the same name (not a number) for its entire extent."

How the street actually lost its title and the actual length of Yonge Street proper is admittedly a little messy, even today. There's debate over whether Yonge's status changed after many highways in Ontario were "downloaded" to the municipal level in the late '90s or whether Yonge and Highway 11 were always wrongly conflated, even from the start.

Guinness World Records pegs Yonge proper as 35 miles long, ending "just north of Holland Landing," and tracing Yonge on Google Maps today, it indeed appears to terminate at a listed tourist attraction named "The End of Yonge Street" right around there. But then you move over west a bit, and there's Simcoe Road 4 that's also partially known as Yonge Street, continuing north for another 18 miles or so into Barrie. This section gets its own Google Maps tourist attraction at the south end called "The beginning of the other Yonge Street," emphasis mine. 

Yes, even as a local, it's all a little confusing. Bottom line, Toronto's Yonge Street stops being "Yonge Street" somewhere around the Lake Simcoe area and therefore hasn't been listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's longest street since 1999.

Instead, Guinness World Records lists Airport Road, also in the Greater Toronto Area, as the world's longest street at 50 miles long, as of this writing. Take that with a grain of salt, though, as the organization itself opens the entry with this caveat: "It is hard to say exactly what the longest street in the world is, as there are many variations in how different types of road are named and classified. The strongest candidates, however, are all located in Ontario, Canada. Here civic planners took the unusual decision to extend the road layout grids of the cities on Lake Ontario north into the countryside."

Bathurst Street, for example, runs for 37 miles but has an asterisk in the form of a highway-crossing kink; Simcoe Road is almost 50 miles long but changes names throughout. But Airport is 50 miles uninterrupted, although some maps apparently have it measuring 60 miles. Personally, I refuse to believe there isn't some road out there in North Africa or something reaching into Europe that would trounce any throughway in southern Ontario and simply hasn't been recognized by the folks who discover and recognize this sort of thing. And for the record, "longest street" is a different can of worms than the longest highways, 10 of which can be found here. 

Interestingly, based on both vibes and some openly erroneous internet reporting, I'm hardly the first journalist or indeed Canadian to have completely missed the memo about Yonge losing its "longest street" title 27 years ago. MotorTrend, for example, ran an entire feature in 2010 about driving all 1,178 miles of Yonge in a Mercedes with the headline "The Longest Street in the World," without once mentioning that it's been 11 years since it last officially held that record. And I was even able to find a local CP24 news story written mere days ago in 2026 about a fundraising run that continues to falsely describe Yonge Street as "the longest street in the world."

Google "longest street in the world" right now and a quick skim of the results will likely have the average person believe it's still Yonge, and you have to dig to find any mention of Airport Road. Yes, clicking through to a lot of the resulting articles or actually reading through the AI Overview does lead to explanations of the myth, but who has time for all that? Lastly, I haven't conducted any surveys, but as a Canadian, I'd be willing to bet that if you asked 10 people walking down Yonge Street right now what the longest street in the world is, about nine of them would still say "Yonge."

But they'd be wrong. We were all wrong. We've been wrong for almost 30 years. Excuse me while I question how many other dumb myths we've believed simply because none of us knew any better.