Highway is a modern term. It is a public road that can run cars. Cars, bicycles, rickshaws, horses and many other means of transportation and pedestrians can walk. In the early days, there were no restrictions on roads, most of them were simple roads, and later different roads had different restrictions.

Due to the increasingly developed traffic, more and more restricted roads were used, especially some roads were specially used for cars (some urban roads were from prohibition of bicycles to prohibition of motorcycles), and the type of expressway was developed, which was specially used for the whole closed use of cars.

Source: @aljay_thefirst