Another view of the eastbound Grand Central Parkway, taken from the 164th Street overpass, towards that carrying 168th Street across the highway. East of 168th Street, the Grand Central leaves its cramped, cantilevered prison and returns to a more parkway-like, bucolic setting. The exit for Utopia Parkway is coming up, which requires an appendix to Parkway 101 for those not native to New York City.
Parkways within the city limits are not always parkways, and even when they are, they are not always arterial highways. Utopia Parkway is neither of these things. A north-south route from Jamaica to Beechhurst on the North Shore, it barely qualifies as a secondary road. For much of its run, it is basically just a tree lined avenue, albeit separated by a center median for a good stretch, which no doubt gives it some secondary road cache. Other similarly misnamed parkways include the decidedly un-park-like Fort Hamilton Parkway in Brooklyn and both Douglaston and Marathon Parkways further northeast in Douglaston, Queens. To top off the insanity of calling Fort Hamilton a parkway is the fact that it is an especially truck laden business thoroughfare. Utopia, Douglaston and Marathon at least are mostly residential. Then you have hybrid secondary road class parkways like Ocean in Brooklyn, or Pelham Parkway in The Bronx, whose medians tend to offer park-like accommodations such as benches and bike lanes. Those do indeed restrict commercial traffic to their service road lanes. Even then, such vehicles are only supposed to use them for local deliveries within the block they enter.