Road Tunnels in Brazil — Complete List by Length

• 103entries listed
• 3.15 kmlongest bore
• 1887–2010openings span
• 61.56 kmtotal length

The record table

How this archive measures: lengths, bores, dates and ordering

How this table is compiled

Where one of these 102 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for Brazil, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two. The 102 rows for Brazil are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2010 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

Lengths for Brazil are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 28 m and not a rounded figure. The longest entry is 112.4 times the shortest and 8.9 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

A new scheme in Brazil would have to beat 3.15 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The dated entries fall across 39 different years, which is a rough measure of whether this was a sustained programme or a handful of separate schemes.

Dated entries run from 1887 to 2010, and the busiest decade is the 1970s with 26 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 103 rows and records Tunnel, Length (m), Date of opening, State and Notes for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Dates for Brazil refer to opening to traffic, not breakthrough, so the 1887 entry was under construction for some years before that. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 61.56 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Reading the figures

This page records the road tunnels catalogued for Brazil in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. The date of opening column runs from 1 to 2010 across 76 dated rows, and the 1970s alone account for 21 of them, so the building effort here came in waves rather than evenly.

The shorter half of the table totals 11.28 km against 50.28 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows. The tunnel column names 103 distinct entries on this page, Irineu Meirales (TD1) and Plinio Marcos (TD3) among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

Roughly 18 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 33 distinct places and structures — Paulo, Imigrantes and Janeiro among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The dated entries carry 39 distinct opening years across 123 years, and the median opening year is 1974. Read down the length (m) column, the 103 values run from 28 m to 3 146 m with a midpoint at 360 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

After the 1970s the next busiest decade here is the 1990s with 17 openings, so the building effort came in more than one wave. Only 36 of the 103 rows carry anything in the road column, so that field describes a minority of this table and the rest of the rows are recorded without it.