Just what is a parkway, anyway?
It's the sort of comic statement that makes the e-mail rounds at least once a
year - a list of "hey, that's cute" statements which are always enjoyable
the first time, and become tedious by the fourth or fifth. Within that list we
almost always find:
Why are they called "freeways" when you have
to pay a toll on some of them?
or:
Why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways?
These show up hundreds of times on the web. On at least one page I found someone
who tried to answer many of the questions asked. Which perhaps suggests that this
was someone without a sense of humor.
Dictionary.com
gives us a couple of rather definitive definitions of a parkway:
A broad landscaped highway, often divided by a planted median strip.
and
a wide scenic road planted with trees
and I suppose that these are enough for us to understand that at some point along
the line there was actual logic in the name.
Go to: A superhighway without information, or
Go to: Fort PC.