Many parks in large American cities seem to be set up more for automobile travel than for getting around on foot or even by bicycle.
An example is Belle Isle Park in Detroit. The park has a very distinguished history. It was designed in part by Frederick Law Olmstead, and it contains several exceptionally attractive older buildings. Its location in the Detroit River guarantees striking views of boat traffic on the river as well as of downtown Detroit and of Windsor, Ontario. But the roads in the park contain at most narrow, cracked sidewalks—and many don’t have sidewalks at all. If you want to walk, or run, in the park, you have to do so either on the grass or in traffic. Full disclosure: I haven’t been in Belle Isle Park since the late 1980s, when I ran from downtown to the park, hoping to find a place that felt like, say, Central Park. I was disappointed, and I’ve never been back. But it looks from a “tour” of the park that I recently made on Google Street View that things haven’t changed much. There are now striped bicycle lanes in some of the main roadways, but the miniscule sidewalks are even more cracked than they were in the 1980s. Of course, the park’s early designers including Olmstead didn’t plan the park to be a place that only automobiles could get around in comfortably—there weren’t any automobiles in the 1880s!—but cars were allowed to take over in the 20th century.
Belle Isle may be an extreme example, but most other big-city parks in the United States have similar issues. As I wrote in an earlier post, it’s nearly impossible in Fairmount Park (Philadelphia) to walk or run anywhere far without spending much of the time along major roads. Golden Gate Park (San Francisco) was (surprisingly) similar until the Pandemic. You couldn’t walk or run the length of the park without following busy roads for much of the way. Places like the Mall in Washington and the Midway in Chicago are even more completely dominated by the several parallel roads that extend their entire length—and cross them at regular intervals.
Only in a few big-city parks—notably Central and Prospect Parks—have some of the roadways been ceded permanently to pedestrians and cyclists. This is mostly a New York phenomenon, however. Elsewhere in the United States, automobile hegemony has generally been too firmly entrenched for change to be conceivable.
This is certainly the case with Chicago’s Lakefront parks. Lake Shore Drive occupies a substantial space along very nearly the entire length of Lakefront parkland. For much of the distance, the park is very narrow, so that park users are never out of sight—and earshot—of a roadway that’s essentially a freeway, even if trucks are banned and there are a couple of traffic lights downtown. It’s possible that no other major city in the world has allowed its most important park to be so completely given over to automobile traffic.
A partial exception occurs in the northeastern part of the North Side’s Lincoln Park, north of Belmont Harbor, and especially north of Montrose Harbor. Here there’s a fairly wide expanse of parkland east of Lakeshore Drive. Lincoln Park north of Belmont Avenue covers an area larger than that of Central Park. The end of the Montrose breakwater is more than a mile on foot or bicycle from Lakeshore Drive.
The northeastern part of Lincoln Park is a complicated place. It includes two bird sanctuaries, three beaches, two marinas, numerous playing fields, a golf course, perhaps three miles of Army-Corps-of-Engineers-created concrete steps along the shoreline, many acres of traditional grass-and-open-forest parkland, and the Chicago Lakefront’s most substantial hill. As a bonus, the peninsula sticking into the Lake at the latitude of Montrose Avenue provides what is arguably the best view of Chicago’s downtown skyscrapers.
Unfortunately, this part of Lincoln Park also includes a network of roads that has assured that even here park users are hardly ever far from traffic. In summer months, the park north of Montrose has typically been full of cars containing people looking for a place to park or (in some cases) a location in which to set up a barbecuing station. On weekend afternoons, the northeastern part of the park has sometimes felt more like a stadium parking lot on the day of a major game than, well, a park in anything like the traditional sense of the word.
Map of the northern part of Lincoln Park and surrounding city streets. The green lines show paths for pedestrians and cyclists and are only approximate. GIS data are from the Chicago Data Portal and the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap; they have been somewhat modified.
This year, however, has been different. Because of the Pandemic, the Lakefront parks east of Lakeshore Drive were closed on March 26 in order to discourage crowding. The Lakefront trails for pedestrians and bicycles—as well as the harbors and the Sydney Marovitz golf course—were reopened on (or just after) June 22 with the proviso that gathering in large groups was forbidden. In practice, the entire park was opened to pedestrians and cyclists, even the substantial areas in the northeast that are quite far from the pedestrian and bicycle trails (the beaches being an intermittently policed exception). Cars, however, were only allowed in the park if drivers could demonstrate that they were going to a marina or to the golf course. Guards enforced the car ban.
As a result, away from the main pedestrian and cycling paths, the northeastern region of the park was startlingly empty of people and cars. 
Generally, lots of us—certainly including me—found this absolutely wonderful.
It was possible to get away from the noise and danger of traffic. Chicago’s Lakefront parks had never felt so park-like.
On approximately November 1, while leaving “park closed” signs and some barriers up, the city withdrew the guards who were preventing most cars from entering the park.
Suddenly, the northeastern part of the park was jammed with cars again, at least on weekends. Air quality plummeted. Car-horn honking and motorcycle revving were louder than waves breaking along the shoreline. It became dangerous to walk across the roads.
Of course, I acknowledge that the folks who like to visit the park by car are legitimate stakeholders too, even if their chief goal is to set up barbecue stations. It would be pretty obnoxious to argue that they have no right to use the park (although, as long as the Pandemic continues, it probably makes sense to discourage group activities).
But, still, one does wonder whether there have to be so many cars and so many roads in the northeastern part of the park—and whether the roads need to be quite so wide. Closing off some of the roads and narrowing the others and then substituting vegetation for asphalt would improve the park experience for quite a lot of people.
The question is: have we built elaborate city parks for the convenience and comfort of automobiles, or to allow people to get away from places dominated by the automobile? My guess is that even many drivers would prefer a park that felt a little less like a parking lot.
Note added 15 December 2020. During Thanksgiving week, barriers were put at all road entrances to the northeastern part of Lincoln Park. These made it impossible to drive into the park except across lawns. The barriers have worked quite well. The park is once again an excellent place for socially-distanced car-free recreation.
Note added 19 February 2021. During the week of February 15, the Chicago Park District reopened roads in the northeastern part of Lincoln Park to traffic. This was surely good news for people who wanted drive into the park. It wasn’t good news at all to those of us who’d been enjoying a substantial car-free zone for much of last eight months.
Note added 13 September 2022. Since I wrote the above, Belle Isle has acquired new, striped sidewalks. The view noted above has been changed to this.