On Wed, 20 Jan 2010 01:23:15 +0000 (UTC), Joe Makowiec
wrote:

On 19 Jan 2010 in rec.travel.usa-canada, Don Kirkman wrote:

Indeed. The first (in the world, maybe--1940) was The Arroyo Seco
Parkway, now the Pasadena Freeway.

Robert Moses was building parkways around New York City in the 1930s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Yor...Parkway_System
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses#Influence

As the above cite notes, the first NY parkways date back to 1908
and although limited access didn't really meet the current
concept of a freeway. I'm not going to wade through the list of
New York parkways to figure out when they became modern.
Certainly even the older portions of the Taconic Parkway met most
otf the standards of a modern freeway although the curves were a
bit tight and there wasn't much of a shoulder. Wikipedia says it
was completed in the early 1960s, but I'm almost certain I drove
it from the northern end south in the 1950s.

The Arroyo Seco Parkway was completed in 1940 but the first
German autobahn, which was more like a mdoern freeway/motorway,
was opened in 1931 (Hitler was not the one who came up with the
need).

I drove the Pasadena Freeway a few times in the 1960s and the
arroyo portion seemed pretty dangerous by modern standards. But a
recent drive on it indicated that a lot had been done to update
it.

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