A bit off topic, but I finally read why these roads are called Parkways. Remember the phrase: why do you drive on a parkway and park on a driveway?
Back in the days before cars were around, horse-drawn carriages were used for viewing state parks by the well-to-do. When cars were beginning to replace horses, only the rich could afford cars and driving through the park was a way to view nature and a way to get out of the city-scape. The trails were widened a bit and paved for cars. The park was still seen as a landscape beauty scene for the well-todo, and the road was called a parkway, as it was the only way into/out of and through the park. After a few more years when cars were available to the masses for basic transportation to/from work and such, the traffic jams in the parkways became awful and additional roads were built to avoid the parks. At the same time, foot trails and other means of non-vehicular modes of transportation began to be built within the parks.
Any way, that is how the Parkway got its name: a singular road through an actual park for viewing scenery by the well-off.
Described in "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro, a Pulitzer-prize biography of Robert Moses, "architect" of New York.
