I don't know about NY but in Chicago commercial vehicles are not allowed on boulevards. I always just assumed it was weight restrictions or the city trying to keep semis off lake shore drive. I found this online...........

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The rationale behind the rules took some digging and, frankly, is a bit elusive. My City Hall sources had a tough time accounting for how this all came to be and, it seems, they don’t get this question very often. One person even called my request “WBEZ’s latest trivial pursuit question.” Perhaps, but we’re assuming that Jef isn’t the only Chicago truck owner who’s anxious about driving the Drive.

Regardless, the best account I could get is a historical one, and it comes from the top source on Chicago maps: Dennis McClendon, who produced maps for the Encyclopedia of Chicago. And get this: He even drew the original CTA system map.

Anyway, McClendon says the truck issue likely gets down to a mentality, one which dates back to the late 1800s when Lake Shore drive was first planned.

“It was to be a pleasure drive,” McClendon explains. “It was not to be a traffic carrying arterial, it was a way to enjoy the park in your carriage or your brougham.” (A brougham being a light carriage that was drawn by a single horse.)

“I think it was Thursday afternoons were set aside for fast driving,” McClendon says. “So the young men who lived on the Gold Coast nearby would bring their fastest trotting horses and their lightweight broughams and race each other.”

By the 1930s, McClendon says, this parkway grew into the Outer Drive and Inner Drive we know today. The idea was to allow more traffic on Lake Shore Drive but this whole concept of a “pleasure drive” stuck, meaning the proscription against commercial vehicles (pickup trucks included) is really just a holdover, one that’s consistent with a bias that kept commercial or “working” life separate from upper-crust residential life.

Consider, he says, that fancy apartment buildings once had separate entrances for residents and tradesmen.

“You wouldn’t want a scruffy workman carrying his tool box through the front door, just as ‘Miss High Nose’ was coming out with her poodle,” McClendon says.