These words refer to open ways for public passage, particularly for the movement of vehicles rather than of pedestrians. Street is a generic term for all such public ways that lie within a town or city: the intersection of the two busiest streets in the neighbourhood. Avenue can sometimes be used more formally as a generic term similar to street , but avenues are often wider, more important or more elegant streets : the famed Avenue des Champs-Elysées in Paris. Specifically, avenue can refer to a public way, usually in a residential suburb, that is not a through street but that terminates in a T-intersection at both ends. The term is sometimes used loosely, however, to confer gentility on any sort of street ?wide or narrow, through or closed ?in cases where street itself would serve equally well. In the same way, drive is gaining in use as a more elegant substitute for street . Crescent is a word with some distinctiveness, since it refers to a short, curving street that leaves a roadway at one point to rejoins it farther on. Avenue , drive and crescent like can form part of the name of the street , as in Seaview Crescent .

Lane and boulevard indicate sharply contrasting kinds of streets . Lane suggests a narrow, sometimes dead-end, street behind or between buildings, that exists solely to permit egress for deliveries, pick-ups or the parking of vehicles: carrying out the garbage bins for collection in the lane . While the word may be perfectly neutral in this sense, it often has connotations of an unsavoury darkness, dankness or uncleanness: parks, rather than back lanes , for children to play in. Sometimes the word can be used with an affected quaintness for any street , particularly a narrow one, even though it permits through traffic and is faced by buildings or houses: Henrietta Lane . While boulevard can be applied to any city street , particularly a wide one, the word has connotations in sharp contrast to lane , suggesting a residential street enhanced by greenery or a median strip containing grass and shrubbery: expensive houses facing on a landscaped boulevard .

The remaining words refer mostly to public ways outside of towns and cities. Road here is as informal and general as street and is often used as an alternative to street within towns, but it has an even wider range of connotation. The word can suggest anything from a dirt track for vehicles to the most modern and sophisticated highway . The latter now refers to any bitumen-surfaced or otherwise sealed road constructed for travelling motor vehicles: additional funds for building roads ; small towns whose main streets are simply wider parts of the highway ; turning off the main highway on to a winding gravel road . Unqualified, highway has few imponderable connotations; road has many. It can refer to any course that leads to a certain destination: the road to nuclear disaster.

Expressway refers exclusively to a specific kind of highway with obvious connotations of rapid travel, made possible by a wide surface and by fly-overs and underpasses that eliminate traffic lights and intersections. Expressways are multi-laned and well lit; the better modern examples are pleasantly landscaped and free of advertising hoardings. Some, such as the Inter-City Expressway between Sydney and Newcastle, require the payment of a toll. Motorway is a term used in New Zealand to describe a city-access highway on which expressway conditions apply, i.e., prohibition of parking, controlled access, elimination of cross traffic because of specially designed junctions, and elimination of ribbon development. In Australia, a portion of a highway leading into a built-up city area may be declared a clearway , which, like expressway , carries connotations of rapid travel. A clearway retains its original cross intersections and traffic lights, but parking and even stopping (except by public-transport vehicles) are forbidden during peak hours.