Parkway
ART-PKY-07 Parkway
Related Media
AlignedFreeways stopped being PRETTY (And that's a shame!)
Road Guy RobRob tells the story of the Merritt Parkway as a showcase of landscape architecture, with planted medians and 68 individually designed bridges, then asks why the Interstate highways built two decades later abandoned beauty for pure machine efficiency. It is the Commonway System's parkway pattern at its best, and the freeway-like tradition that followed is exactly why the pattern now carries a Situational status.
AlignedAmerica's scenic drives
CBS Sunday MorningConor Knighton tours America's national scenic byways from Oregon to Louisiana, showing how these designated routes are preserved and experienced as journeys worth taking for their own sake. It gives the Commonway System's Scenic Highway / Byway pattern a concrete national reference, including the federal designation program the pattern cites.
AlignedParkways - Transportation
NPS describes its parkways as roads designed for scenic motoring through protected corridors, with pull-offs, lower speed limits, and landscape-first design built as 1930s job-creation projects. This is the federal expression of the Commonway System's parkway pattern, where the road is shaped by the landscape instead of by throughput.
Context onlyRoads to inequality: How white supremacy was built into New York's parkways
The investigation traces how Madison Grant's Bronx River Parkway was built for leisurely nature drives by car-owning suburbanites, while Robert Moses' Long Island parkways used low bridges and truck and bus bans that physically kept city bus riders out. It documents the caution behind the Commonway System's Situational rating: a parkway's beauty does not stop its design from deciding who is allowed to use it.
AlignedNational Scenic Byways Program
Federal Highway AdministrationFHWA's official program page explains how roads earn National Scenic Byway or All-American Road designation under 23 U.S.C. Section 162 for outstanding scenic, historic, cultural, natural, recreational, or archaeological qualities, with grants for corridor management plans. It is the authoritative reference for the Commonway System's Scenic Highway / Byway pattern and the exact federal program the page cites.
AlignedSkyline Drive and Shenandoah National Park
The episode traces how Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway were designed as naturalistic scenic drives through the Southern Appalachians, with NPS landscape architects shaping the road to frame the scenery and serve the drive itself. It gives the history behind the Commonway System's Scenic Highway / Byway pattern: a low-density, low-development-pressure arterial where the journey is the point.
Typical at: Rural Suburban Compact Urban
#Speed and modal hierarchy
Design speed & speed limit
Modal hierarchy
#Design notes
The term "parkway" carries genuinely conflicting meanings across American road-building history, spanning a limited-access freeway-like facility and a slower boulevard-like facility through or alongside parkland.1 A Parkway built to genuine freeway standards falls outside CS's Functional Classification system entirely and should be read as a Freeway pattern instead; this page's guidance does not apply to it. The more historically common case, a Parkway that does not meet freeway standards, must be classified and designed as an Arterial, subject to all Arterial standards including the no-direct-access, no-on-street-parking rule, since AASHTO's own functional classification system carries no separate parkway category.2 The scenic, landscaped character historically associated with parkways can and should be retained through median plantings, tree canopy, and generous right-of-way, but character alone does not exempt the facility from Arterial access-management rules. This classification ambiguity, not a design tradeoff, is why the pattern carries the stronger Discouraged caution rather than an ordinary Situational one; it renders under the publication's combined Situational/Discouraged badge since Discouraged is not yet a distinct status value.
#Related patterns
default Freeway pattern (FRE-DEF-01) (redirect target for freeway-standard parkways); default Arterial pattern (ART-DEF-01) (the standards a non-freeway parkway must follow); Boulevard (ART-BLV-02), Scenic Highway/Byway (ART-SCB-03) (related but distinct Arterial subtypes)
#References
- Precedent-based National Park Service, Park Roads and Parkways: A History. Documents the freeway-standard vs. boulevard-standard tension in American parkway design, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation's unsuccessful push to AASHTO's own Task Force on Geometric Design for a distinct parkway classification.(opens in new tab)
- Legal / regulatory American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets ("Green Book").(opens in new tab)