Parkway

A parkway is a landscaped thoroughfare.^[1] The term is particularly used for a roadway in a park or connecting to a park from which trucks and other heavy vehicles are excluded.^[1]

Over the years, many different types of roads have been labeled parkways. The term may be used to describe city streets as narrow as two lanes with a landscaped median, wide landscaped setbacks, or both.

The term has also been applied to scenic highways and to limited-access roads more generally. Many parkways originally intended for scenic, recreational driving have evolved into major urban and commuter routes.

Eastern Parkway in New York City, the world's first parkway, according to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation

.

The first parkways in the

Other parkways, such as Park Presidio Boulevard in

were designed to serve larger volumes of traffic.

During the early 20th century, the meaning of the word was expanded to include

aesthetics. It and others have become major commuting routes, while retaining the name "parkway".

Early high speed roads

See also:

Parkways in New York State

In New York City, construction on the

, who used parkways to provide access to newly created state parks, especially for city dwellers. As Commissioner of New York City Parks under Mayor LaGuardia, he extended the parkways to the heart of the city, creating and linking its parks to the greater metropolitan systems.

Most of the New York metropolitan parkways were designed by Gilmore Clark. The famed "Gateway to New England"

; and other cities at the beginning of the 20th century.

In the 1930s, as part of the New Deal, the U.S. federal government constructed National Parkways designed for recreational driving and to commemorate historic trails and routes. These divided four-lane parkways have lower speed limits and are maintained by the National Park Service. An example is the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) built Blue Ridge Parkway in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina and Virginia.

Others are Skyline Drive in Virginia; the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee; and the Colonial Parkway in eastern Virginia's Historic Triangle area.^[7] The George Washington Memorial Parkway and the Clara Barton Parkway, running along the Potomac River near Washington, D.C., and Alexandria, Virginia, were also constructed during this era.

In

in 2006.

The Arroyo Seco Parkway from Pasadena to Los Angeles, built in 1940, was the first segment of the vast Southern California freeway system. It became part of State Route 110 and was renamed the Pasadena Freeway. A 2010 restoration of the freeway brought the Arroyo Seco Parkway designation back.

In the

.

In New Jersey, the Garden State Parkway, connecting the northern part of the state with the Jersey Shore, is restricted to buses and non-commercial traffic north of the Route 18 interchange, but trucks are permitted south of this point. It is one of the busiest toll roads in the country.^[8]

In the

.

In the suburbs of Philadelphia, U.S. Route 202 follows an at-grade parkway alignment known as the "U.S. Route 202 Parkway" between Montgomeryville and Doylestown. The parkway varies from two to four lanes in width, has 5-foot-wide (1.5 m) shoulders, a 12-foot-wide (3.7 m) walking path called the US 202 Parkway Trail on the side, and a 40 mph (64 km/h) speed limit. The parkway opened in 2012 as a bypass of a section of US 202 between the two towns; it had originally been proposed as a four-lane freeway before funding for the road was cut.^[9][10][11]

In

In Cincinnati, parkways are major roads which trucks are prohibited from using. Some Cincinnati parkways, such as Columbia Parkway, are high-speed, limited-access roads, while others, such as Central Parkway, are multi-lane urban roads without controlled access. Columbia Parkway carries US-50 traffic from downtown towards east-side suburbs of Mariemont, Anderson, and Milford, and is a limited access road from downtown to the Village of Mariemont.

In

) have evolved into regional commuter routes.

Icefields Parkway runs through the Canadian Rockies in Jasper National Park and Banff National Park

.

"Parkway" is used in the names of many Canadian roads, including major routes through national parks, scenic drives, major urban thoroughfares, and even regular freeways that carry commercial traffic.

Parkways in the National Capital Region are administered by the National Capital Region (Canada). However, some of them are named "drive" or "driveway".

The term in Canada is also applied to multi-use paths and greenways used by walkers and cyclists.^[14][15]

• Airport Parkway (Ottawa)
• Aviation Parkway (Ottawa)
• Broad Street in Saint John, New Brunswick
• Ottawa, Ontario
• Conestoga Parkway in Kitchener, Ontario
• Don Valley Parkway in Toronto, Ontario
• Emil Kolb Parkway in Bolton, Ontario
• Mississauga, Ontario
• Forest Hills Parkway in
  Halifax, Nova Scotia
• Guelph, Ontario
• Icefields Parkway in Alberta
• Ottawa, Ontario
• Lauzon Parkway in Windsor, Ontario
• Lincoln M. Alexander Parkway in Hamilton, Ontario
• Niagara Parkway in Southern Ontario
• Ojibway Parkway in Windsor, Ontario
• Ottawa, Ontario
• Red Hill Valley Parkway in Hamilton, Ontario
• The Parkway in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador
• Thousand Islands Parkway in Eastern Ontario

In the United Kingdom, the term "parkway" more commonly refers to park and ride railway stations, where this is often indicated as part of the name, as with Bristol Parkway, the first such station, opened in 1972.

light railway).

Parkways fitting the definition applied in this article also exist, as listed in this section.

Peterborough

The city of

has roads branded as "parkways" which provide routes for much through traffic and local traffic. The majority are dual carriageways, with many of their junctions numbered. Five main parkways form an orbital outer ring road. Three parkways serve settlements.

In the City of Plymouth, the A38 is called "The Parkway" and bisects a rural belt of the local authority area, which coincides with the geographical centre; it has two junctions to enter the downtown part of the city.

The Australian Capital Territory uses the term "parkway" to refer to roadways of a standard approximately equivalent to what would be designated as an "expressway", "freeway", or "motorway" in other areas. Parkways generally have multiple lanes in each direction of travel, no intersections (crossroads are accessed by interchanges), high speed limits, and are of dual carriageway design (or have high crash barriers on the median).^[16]

uses the term "parkway" to sometimes refer to smaller local access roads that travel through parkland. Unlike other uses of the term, these parkways are not high-speed routes but may still have some degree of limited access.

Singapore uses the term "parkway" as an alternative to "expressway". As such, parkways are also dual carriageways with high speed limits and interchanges. The East Coast Parkway is currently^[when?] the only expressway in Singapore that uses this terminology.

In Russia, long, broad (multi-lane) and beautified thoroughfares are referred to as prospekts.

• Central reservation
• Green belt
• Linear park
• Park
• Road verge

• "Why do we drive on the parkway and park on the driveway?" The Straight Dope Archived May 12, 2008, at the Wayback Machine