Most if not all of the signs on the southern side of the border omit any mention of cities. Americans only know so much Canadian geography. 
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I see city names from across the border signed here in northern Vermont.
Maybe that’s not common though. And yeah, sometimes it is just Quebec or Canada more generally.
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Oui certains pourraient être méfiants sur leur possibilité de retour en lisant Exit only 
Les exemples de Minh_Nguyen et ezekielf se rapportent à des affiches à proximité de la frontière.
Par contre, au début de la sortie 133 de I-95, il est annoncé Direction 201 Fairfield, Skowhegan
puis à la fin de la bretelle à la jonction de la 201 on ajoute Jackman 87 (milles)
À Bingham, après la jonction de la 16, on annonce Canadian bdr 65
À Jackman, à la jonction de la 6, on annonce Quebec 112 (enfin!)
Donc en prenant à l’envers l’argumentation de l’importance à partir de Québec, si on regarde à partir des affiches près de la I-95, peut-on affirmer que Québec est une destination Importante pour les automobilistes du sud du Maine? 
Joking aside, control cities along Interstate Highways are standardized by AASHTO at the request of their members, who represent state departments of transportation. As far as I know, Canadian authorities have no say in the matter. Nevertheless, the official list does include a few points north:
- I-5: Vancouver, B.C. (north of Seattle)
- I-81: Canada (north of Watertown)
- I-87: Montreal (north of Albany)
- I-89: Montreal (north of St. Albans)
- I-91: Sherbrooke (north of Newport)
In case you’re wondering, none of the control cities are in Mexico. Some states supplement this list with their own informal control cities, especially off the Interstate system. Control cities have indirectly influenced the U.S. community’s choice of “trunk cities”. However, there’s more nuance, because our goal is an interconnected cross-continental network, rather than efficient wayfinding along a linear route.
Of course the provincial ministries of transportation “have no say”: it’s your national highway system, not ours. We also don’t have an equivalent to AASHTO, nor to their interstate “control cities”, and don’t have a national inter-provincial highway system in the first place.
Except reality is we don’t have an interconnected cross-continental highway network of “trunk” roads the likes of your interstate system. We have literally one trans-national highway route. 
Understood. Just wanted to address the idea of provincial-state agreements that came up. Regardless, control cities are an imperfect measure of importance because they serve a specific purpose. They hint at importance but that’s all.
The trunk network is cross-continental across the continent, if not up and down it. 
A map style can of course decide to display both highway=trunk and highway=primary with similar prominence if that serves its design goals. Another map style can decide to display only highway=trunk and highway=motorway, omitting all lower classes. A map like this is very low detail, but it is a reasonable choice for a small scale map that just wants to show a basic generalization of the road network.
I apologize if machine translation has given me the wong idea, it seems you are suggesting here that highway=primary and highway=trunk are of equal importance. If so, I expect this is the heart of our disagreement. My understanding of the consensus view is that they are not equal. highway=trunk is for the most important roads, and highway=primary is for next level down the importance hierarchy. “primary” certainly is a deceptive term here. Perhaps it would have been clearer if the OSM highway classification had been created as:
- Primary & Motorway
- Secondary
- Tertiary
- Quaternary
… etc
But instead we have:
- Trunk & Motorway
- Primary
- Secondary
- Tertiary
.. etc
Yes, my examples have very little to do with the actual topic of this thread. I just felt compelled to show that in some places south of the border we are not quite so ignorant of Canadian geography.
I wouldn’t mind staying. I miss the poutine already 
, and it would force me to finally learn French.
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Bump!
I saw this thread come up repeatedly in this other one about “not discussing” highway classifications (
) and was inspired to pull some data from the Quebec Ministry of Transportation (link; previously shared by @PierZen elsewhere), to further reinforce the original point I and others were making about the relative importance of the subject road and its associated border crossing in the Quebec road network. I also want to substantiate that point with something more objective than my previous comments, which I wouldn’t blame anybody for feeling was just me writing “IDGAF about Portland, Maine”.
I’ve double-checked every port of entry to and from Quebec (there’s one at Churubusco, New York where the Canadian POE was closed some years ago, so only one-way traffic into the US is permissible there), cross-referencing with the current OSM data to note the classifications of the highways to and from the border crossings, and summarized the daily car traffic as follows:
(note: “AADT” = Average Annual Daily Traffic. En français it’s “DJMA”; débit journalier moyen annuel. It’s basically “cars per day”, including both directions of travel.)
| Crossing Name | Route Number | 2024 AADT | OSM Rd. Class. | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| St-Bernard-de-Lacolle | 15 | 6700 | Motorway | |
| Stanstead | 55 | 3000 | Trunk | Autoroute 55 & I-91 are tagged Motorway north and south of the border—only the crossing itself is tagged as Trunk |
| St-Armand / Philipsburg | 133 | 2900 | Trunk | I-89 is tagged as Motorway |
| Stanstead (Beebe) | 247 | 2800 | Secondary | turns into a road (Canusa Street) that straddles the border through the rest of the town of Beebe |
| Armstrong | 173 | 590 | Primary | US Route 201/Maine Route 6 tagged as Trunk |
| Lacolle | 221 | no data | Secondary | 2020 AADT = 550 |
| Lacolle | 223 | 540 | Secondary | |
| Herdman | 202 | 520 | Secondary | |
| Woburn | 161 | 490 | Primary | |
| Noyan | 225 | 400 | Secondary | |
| Dundee | 132 | no data | Primary | 2018 AADT = 380 |
| St-Aurelie | 277 | 380 | Secondary | |
| Abercorn | 139 | 310 | Primary | Vermont Route 139 is tagged as Secondary |
| Hemmingford | 219 | 300 | Secondary | |
| Hereford Road | 141 | 270 | Primary | |
| Churubusco, NY | 209 | 250 | Secondary | one-way Canada-to-US entry only, no CBSA POE here |
| Stanstead | 143 | 250 | Secondary | |
| Highwater | 243 | 220 | Secondary | |
| Stanhope | 147 | 140 | Primary | Vermont Routes 147 & 114 tagged as Secondary |
| East Hereford | 253 | 140 | Secondary | |
| Chartierville | 257 | 110 | Secondary | US Route 3 tagged as Primary |
| Trout River | 138 | 80 | Primary | |
| Covey Hill | 203 | 70 | Secondary | |
| Clarenceville | N/A | no data | Tertiary | |
| Morses Line | 235 | no data | Secondary | |
| Frelighsburg | 237 | no data | Secondary | |
| East Pinnacle | N/A | no data | Tertiary | |
| Glen Sutton | N/A | no data | Tertiary | |
| St-Zacharie | N/A | no data | Tertiary | crossing only open to holders of Pilot Project for Travellers in Remote Areas–Quebec (PPTRA-Q) permits |
| St-Just-de-Bretenières | N/A | no data | Tertiary | |
| St-Pamphile | N/A | no data | Unclassified | |
| Pohenegamook | N/A | no data | Tertiary/Uncl. | crossing only open to holders of PPTRA-Q permits |
As you can see the border crossing in question, “Armstrong”, has an order of magnitude less traffic than the Route 133 trunk road at the St-Armand/Philipsburg crossing, about 40 miles north of Burlington, Vermont. It’s a kind of analogous situation wherein Autoroute 35 from Montreal by way of St-Jean-sur-Richelieu intersects Route 133 north of Philipsburg and Rte 133 continues south to the border, whereupon the road becomes I-89 and is tagged as motorway again. Note that Rte 133 is four lanes divided, but is not grade separated (and goes through a migratory bird sanctuary on the north side of the border).
I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to keep Route 173 tagged as primary, and I think the stats above illustrate this perfectly. Where better to draw a metaphorical line between primary and trunk than between a road used by 500-600 cars per day and another that gets thousands more?
The argument that had been put forth is that Route 173 from Saint-Georges to the Maine border is trunk-level importance because it eventually ends up becoming a route to Portland and Boston, but reality as illustrated with the statistics above demonstrates that the road is five times less busy than the one at Philipsburg going via I-89 to Burlington, and the one at Stanstead going via I-91 & (eventually splitting) to I-93 to Concord, Springfield and Boston.
Contrast this with Route 138, which is a similarly constructed two-lane undivided road on the north shore of the St. Lawrence and goes about 650 km from Quebec City to Baie Comeau (pop. = ~20,000) & Sept-Îles (~25,000). It’s tagged as highway=trunkand even at its sleepiest, in the most remote parts of the route between Baie-Comeau and Sept-Îles, still carries ~1500 cars per day.
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Thanks for this. I appreciate analysis backed by data.
I think you’ll get no argument from the American side that the Saint-Georges/Maine border crossing has the weakest case of all the border crossings (in this area) that are currently trunk on our side.
The argument has been made that remoteness should have a factor when considering importance. In other words, a road with lower traffic count that is the only road for a great distance around it, could or ought to have a higher highway classification that it would in a more populated area, in order to indicate relative, rather than absolute importance. That is essentially the argument that is being made for this particular crossing.
I made a list of the other border crossings that had trunk on both ends, ignoring cases that had a motorway on one side. I’m wondering if we could do the same sort of analysis on these to see how they stacked up, and if some of the more remote cases on this list look like that Maine crossing. Conversely, we might also identify some cases where the through trunk routing is over classified.
The list:
- Van Buren, ME / Saint-Leonard NB
- Duluth, MN to Thunder Bay, ON = Route 61
- St. Francis, MN to International Falls, ON = Route 71
- MN-313 / MB Route 12
- Portal, ND / North Portal, SK
- Minot to Regina = US-52/SK 39
- Montana 16 / SK 6
- Route 93 Montana/BC
- Route 95 Idaho/BC
- Route 97 Washington/BC
- Washington 9 / BC 11
- Washington 543 / BC 15
- Klondike Highway
- Haines Highway
- Alaska Highway