I travelled through here yesterday and I noticed that the turn from I-84 West to the Taconic Parkway North TTS was weird. Well, the ramps were labeled with “Pwky” as the abbrevieation for three of the four ramps, the fouth was spelled out as Parkway. Now, the road itself, the Taconic State Parkway, uses Pkwy as the abbreviation. The Wiki says to use “Pky” as the abbreviation.
I changed the ramps to use “Parkway” following the “If in doubt, spell it out” doctrine. At least until I get a better idea of what will work. “Pwky” produced a really weird TTS result!
We are debating this in the Canada forum now… Pkwy is the official CanadaPost abbreviation, which are all supposed to work. Pky is the US version… And documented in the TTS to work.
I remember at the 2012 US meetup in CA we ran into the strange “Pwky” TTS on an exit near the hotel we all were staying at. Sounded like “paw-key” or something like that. Best we could figure, it was a simple typo. Pkwy makes sense (ParKWaY), but no way does “Pwky” make sense to me.
US Postal Service also says “Pkwy” is the official form. (But TN for example uses “Pky” on signs and it drives me nuts )
Typically I have been using “Pkwy” for parkways, since the “w” seems to add some clarity and four letters doesn’t seem outrageous to me. I would imagine we chose “Pky” for brevity. “Pkwy” is the accepted abbreviation by both the USPS and the MUTCD (which, if anything, is what we should follow, since Waze is somewhat of a “traffic control device” after all).
For expressways, I’m inclined to use “Expy” because for some reason five letters does seem outrageous to me. It’s also the official USPS abbreviation. However, I’ve seen signs that use “Expwy”, and typically there I’ve just followed the big green sign. And “Expwy” is the official MUTCD abbreviation.
Where the two conflict, I’m inclined to go with the MUTCD on grounds of principle. Of course, this only applies when everything works in Waze—we have to follow USPS for Br “branch” and Brg “Bridge”, and not MUTCD Br “Bridge”, because that’s what TTS does.
I’ve typically seen pkwy used in lieu of parkway or pky. I use it when naming roads and have never heard TTS not pronounce pkwy as parkway (and there’s a couple right near me that I navigate along several times a week). My guess is pwky was a typo that was propagated due to auto-fill.
Pkwy seems to be the most common abbreviation for Parkway, though I’ve also seen Pky, perhaps on legacy signs that haven’t been replaced.
The TTS reads Pkwy as Parkway adequately, and as such there really is no longer any need to spell out the whole word. The abbreviation allows for a more concise banner display and less clutter on the map. I would imagine that anything on the map that still has the word Parkway spelled out is a legacy name from when the TTS didn’t read Pkwy correctly and should probably be changed to reflect the now-functional abbreviation.
TTS always read “Pkwy” properly. The problem in this thread is “Pwky”, which is just a typo. Perhaps the OP didn’t catch the typo and thought it prudent to “when in doubt, spell it out”.
I ended up with Pky as that’s the “official” abbreviation. One of the four ramps was Parkway, the other three were Pwky. I think the pronunciation was “Pooky” IIRC.
I’ll bet you dinner that at least half the people who have read this thread all the way through did not notice the difference between “Pkwy” and “Pwky” until you pointed it out! :lol:
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