Road Tunnels in Iceland — Complete List by Length

• 31entries listed
• 10.8 kmlongest bore
• 1948–2020openings span
• 153.52 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

Where one of these 31 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for Iceland, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two. The 31 rows for Iceland are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2020 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

Lengths for Iceland are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 30 m and not a rounded figure. The longest entry is 360.0 times the shortest and 2.2 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

A new scheme in Iceland would have to beat 10.8 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. Eighth on the list is Ólafsfjörður at 7.14 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure.

15 of the 31 measured entries exceed five kilometres, and those are the ones that carry a full ventilation and escape regime. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 153.52 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Second and third place go to Öxnadalsheiði at 10.7 km and Tröllatunguheiði at 9.4 km. The table on this page runs to 17 rows and records Tunnel projects, Length (m), Date of opening, Region and Notes for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Reading the figures

Further down the table, Hellisheiði is recorded at 8.4 km and Norðfjörður at 7.91 km. Read down the length (m) column, the 17 values run from 1 700 m to 10 800 m with a midpoint at 4 800 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Roughly 25 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. Read down the road column, the 13 values run from 1 to 917 with a midpoint at 60; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Dated entries run from 1948 to 2020, and the busiest decade is the 2020s with 17 recorded openings. The material on this page is held in 7 captions rather than in running text, 86 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

The shortest recorded entry is 0.03 km against 10.8 km at the top, a spread of 360x across the same table. The captions name 12 distinct places and structures — Eskifjörður, Héðinsfjarðar and Breiðadals among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The dated entries carry 11 distinct opening years across 72 years, and the median opening year is 2020. They are not uniform: the fullest runs to 27 words and the briefest to 6, and on a page of this kind the long ones are where the explanation lives — the caption carries what the picture cannot.