Hmm. It looks like the Taconic failed the freeway definition until it allowed commercial traffic (Highway, Freeway, Parkway - Know the Difference - ANSI Blog). Apparently, a parkway was originally a designation for a scenic rad that didn’t allow commercial traffic. However, it turns out that there is no official definition of “parkway” as there is for highway, freeway, and expressway, so maybe this is a technicality?
By the MUTCD definitions at the link, the Arroyo Seco was neither a highway nor an expressway, given that it was designed with only limited access entry/exit.
There aren’t any official definitions , really. Not for all purposes. According to the manual cited in your link
When used in this Manual, the text headings of Standard, Guidance, Option, and Support shall be
defined as follows:
which doesn’t mean those definitions apply outside that manual. Their definition for "highway is
“Highway—a general term for denoting a public way for purposes of vehicular travel, including the entire area within the right-of-way.”
By that definition, any street, including the single lane, one-way street with a 25 mph speed limit where I live is a highway and I don’t think “highway” is used that way in ordinary speech anywhere. Even on the West Coast according to your cite ( and the survey it mentions) “highway” seems refer to a major roadway that you can drive relatively fast on. My Waze and ( my prior GPS devices) have a setting to “avoid highways” which obviously doesn’t mean " avoid any public way meant for vehicles".
The only roads I have heard of in the NYC area that “freeway” is ever used for are some local streets where freeway is part of the name - they are ordinary, local streets with the same speed limits as local streets but just have “Freeway” in the name rather than road , boulevard etc. Like RockawayFreeway , which apparently got its name because it’s mostly “free” of cross traffic.
When I was a kid, I thought the same thing, but toll roads were almost nonexistent in California in the 60’s. I finally realized the “free” in freeway meant the traffic moved freely, with no hindrances from cross-traffic, pedestrians, etc.
That lead me to wonder when the term “freeway” was coined. The term highway is incredibly old (highwaymen!), but as far as I can tell, it was created in the 20th centurey. In fact, my speculation was that it might have been a Western term before being adopted by the rest of the nation.
Actually this is only in Southern California. Not true anywhere else that I know of. Of course, Southern CA might as well be the whole state, in terms of tropes.
I hear “it was an unregistered handgun” but no states require handguns to be registered. Heck, I see news releases from the LA County Sheriffs about “found with an unregistered handgun”, and they should know better.
Or safeties on revolvers. Or chambering a gun to add a threat level.
Having lived on both ends of the state, I can tell you “the 5” e.g. happens up North also. They just like to pretend it doesnt.
Pretty much the whole West Coast. Sometimes in the Midwest on the big ones.
I don’t know if there is an easy list to refer to. I’m pretty sure Maryland, Illinois and Missouri also use the term “State’s Attorney.” To me it’s very confusing because they are the top prosecutor at the county level and are not at state level. To me District Attorney is more logical.
When you speak of a road, it just goes somewhere, like the Frobisher Road, that goes up to the Frobisher estate, after passing the Myerlings snd Breston places and old Ned Tinwck’s farm (he lives alone there, with no apparent heirs, and no one knows what will happen when he buys it), but the road just kind of peters out on the edge of Mauston wood. If you navigate the wood for about a league, you can make your way to the Creighton road, which is a similar kind of dead end at the Briars (yeah, you do not want to go in there).
“Road” it would seem probably has a rooting in “route”, but that is just a guess.
A way usually has some connections, either as junctions or at the next town or both, but mostly it is used by people going somewhere else, rather than nearby (home or whatever). You get to the town, and it has streets, which serve the town, and if you travel the streets, they will eventually lead you to the edge of town, where you can get to a road or way that leads out of town. This is the primary manner in which a street differs from a road or way.
In the heart of the town are its businesses, which tend to cluster around “High Street”, whence comes “highway”, which connets the high street in this town to the high street in the next town up the highway. The “high” part merely elevates the status of the street.
“Avenue” clearly devolves from Latin, “from the place”, meaning it was the street that went to/from something important.
“Boulevard” is a corruption of a term suggesting a laden oxen (“bull’s fardels”), and now I seem to have wandered off the road, into the weeds. But, hat other stuff is plausible enough that it might have some validity.
I enjoyed learning about the origin of “Boulevard.” In exchange, I will mention that I have lived in at least two towns/cities where the main road through town was named “Boulevard” or “The Boulevard.” No other name or designation…just “Boulevard” on the street signs.
I never knew this, and it’s interesting. In my experience, “Boulevard” is a much less common term for a street than the others, and seems generally used for wider-than-normal roads. Which would be reasonable, if they were meant for wide commercial, bull-borne loads.
Women dressing at home like they’re at a cocktail party. Soap operas are big on this. A woman can have an office job where she dresses up, but comes home and talks to her spouse or visitors and is still dressed up. A real woman would be in sweats about 10 seconds after walking through her front door.
