Here in the Denver area a parkway is a divided street with a parklike setting between the two sets of lanes.

The Denver area has a grid numbering and naming system that extends from Golden on the West all the way to the far eastern confines of Aurora, which is hmmm, perhaps 35 miles from Golden. From North to South it also is about 35 miles. Broadway divides west and east, and Ellsworth divides North and South.

The grid system makes navigation very simple, since a quick look in the phone book tells you that S Memphis and Alameda, where I reside, is 172 blocks east of Broadway and three blocks south of Ellsworth. The drawback to buildling the road system on a grid is that it's really inefficient. To go from Aurora to Broomfield you drive 15 miles west and 15 miles north, a total of 30 miles. If there were a diagonal going the same route you would drive a bit over 21 miles, a considerable gas savings if you commute that way every day.

On the other hand, diagonals lend themselves to terrible intersections (anyone who has driven in Washington DC can attest to this.)

Getting back to Parkways -- One of the major routes going east out of Denver is 6th Avenue, but it ceases to be 6th Avenue from Colorado Blvd on out to Monaco, and is there called 6th Avenue Parkway because it is divided with wonderful expanses of lawn and trees between west- and east-bound lanes. There are quite a few other streets just like that throughout the Denver metro area, and they are all named by adding Parkway onto the otherwise normal name of the street.

One last oddity -- if you look at a map of Denver you will see that downtown Denver does not follow the grid system; instead its streets are set at a 45 degree angle to the rest of the area's routes. The numbered streets downtown are called streets, while the numbered streets in the rest of the area are designated as avenues, and they are only north of Ellsworth. Only a very few of the east west roads north of Ellsworth have names that are words, like Colfax AVenue, which replaces 15th Street from one side of the city all the way to the other. It's billed as the longest commercial street in the world. In the entire 35 mile length of it I'd estimate there are no more than 50 or 100 private houses, all the rest is zoned commercial.

You are probably all asking yourselves -- could htis be more boring. Yep.

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TEd