the.com/parkway
The road named for parks where you drive, unlike the driveway where you park.
means A broad, often landscaped road or highway, typically bordered by trees or greenery and sometimes restricted to passenger cars.
from A 19th-century American coinage stitching together "park" and "way." The idea came from landscape designers like Frederick Law Olmsted, who imagined green-bordered roads threading through and between parks — roads that were themselves slices of parkland. So the name was literal once: a way through the park. Only later did "parkway" drift toward meaning any leafy divided road, leaving the punning mismatch with "driveway" for us to puzzle over.
- origin
- Coined for scenic landscaped routes, not commuter slogs
- first one
- New York's Bronx River Parkway opened 1925
- truck ban
- Many parkways legally bar commercial trucks
- design intent
- Built to frame nature, hiding ugly infrastructure
- low bridges
- Some clearances deliberately blocked buses from beaches
blue ridge parkway — 470-mile scenic highway connecting shenandoah national park to great smoky mountains
bronx river parkway — 15.2-mile scenic drive in westchester county and bronx, new york, opened in 1925
garden state parkway — 118-mile toll highway running the length of new jersey, opened in 1952