News & Events
The National Road Network (NRN) coverage now spans from coast to coast with the addition of British Columbia roads.
March 31, 2005
With the addition of the British Columbia road dataset, national coverage of the road network has now been completed. Overall, near 1.1 million of kilometres spanning across all Canadian provinces and territories are available for downloading at no cost on the GeoBase portal.
The British Columbia road network is comprised of more than 72,000 km of roads and was realized thanks to a GeoConnections project leaded by the British Columbia Ministry of Sustainable Resource Management and with the participation of Natural Resources Canada through the Centre for Topographic Information of Sherbrooke.
Now that the Canadian coverage for the NRN has been accomplished, the next challenge is to maintain this network in collaboration with the closest to the source stakeholders. NRCan is consolidating its share of the NRN asset's by signing maintenance agreements with data producing partners. Thus far, NRCan has negotiated and signed with six provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland & Labrador) to maintain the NRN on an annual basis. In 2005, update activities will be lead by these six provinces and these NRN updated datasets will be released via the GeoBase portal. In parallel, negotiations are underway with other provinces and territories to extend this project as a national initiative within a few years.