The freeway is free of crossings, not free of tolls
When the planner Edward M. Bassett coined the word freeway in February 1930, he was thinking about property law rather than prices. Landowners beside an ordinary highway had rights to light, air and access. Along a freeway they had no access at all, so the road ran free of driveways, junctions and crossings.
Bassett sorted roads into three kinds. Highways served the properties along them, while parkways and freeways did not, the difference being that parkways were for recreation and freeways for moving traffic. That idea underpins the modern definition: no traffic signals, no level crossings with roads, railways or footpaths, and entry only by slip roads at interchanges. There are rare exceptions. On Interstate 5, drivers crossing between Oregon and Washington on the Interstate Bridge must stop when the span lifts for ships.
Italy got there first. The engineer Piero Puricelli devised the Autostrada dei Laghi, which opened in 1924 to link Milan with Lake Como and Lake Maggiore, making it the first road anywhere built to join cities and reserved for fast motor traffic. It had just one lane each way and no interchanges. Berlin's AVUS, started in 1913 and opened in 1921, was really a closed loop with two long straights for testing and racing. In 1932 a 30-kilometre stretch between Cologne and Bonn became the first controlled-access autobahn, with no speed limit.
Other countries took different paths. An earlier ancestor, the Long Island Motor Parkway of 1908, had banked curves, guard rails and reinforced concrete, but drivers could still turn left across oncoming cars. Canada's Queen Elizabeth Way opened in 1937 with cloverleaf and trumpet interchanges, and until the Second World War it had the longest lit stretch of road anywhere. Britain, where railways dominated long-distance travel, waited until 1958 for its first motorway, the Preston By-pass.
Words still vary by place. Motorway, autoroute, Autobahn and autostrada have no single worldwide definition, although under the Vienna Convention a motorway forbids walking and parking.
Source: Controlled-access highway
