Road Tunnels in Switzerland — Complete List by Length

• 65entries listed
• 16.94 kmlongest bore
• 1964–2017openings span
• 164.35 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

The three longest entries alone account for 32.83 km of the 164.35 km on this page, which is 20 per cent of the total from 3 of 43 rows. After the 2000s the next busiest decade here is the 1990s with 15 openings, so the building effort came in more than one wave.

Where one of these 43 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for Switzerland, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two. The 43 rows for Switzerland are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2017 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

A new scheme in Switzerland would have to beat 16.94 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The longest entry is 8.5 times the shortest and 5.6 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

8 of the 43 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 164.35 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 Seelisberg at 9.29 km and San Bernardino at 6.6 km. The table on this page runs to 65 rows and records Country, Tunnel, Length (m), Date of opening and Canton for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Reading the figures

The entries sum to roughly 164.35 km of bore, an average of about 3.82 km each, though that average describes no actual row. The tunnel column names 65 distinct entries on this page, St. Gotthard - San Gottardo and Seelisberg among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

Dated entries run from 1964 to 2017, and the busiest decade is the 2000s with 18 recorded openings. The material on this page is held in 28 captions rather than in running text, 321 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

Roughly 30 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 37 distinct places and structures — Treytel, Visp and Göschenen among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The dated entries carry 33 distinct opening years across 53 years, and the median opening year is 2001. The altitudes stated in those captions run from 1 528 to 2 958 metres above sea level across 16 recorded points, which is the dimension this page is about — height, where the length tables are about span.

They are not uniform: the fullest runs to 26 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. Ventilation and escape provision, not bore length, drive most of the cost on modern road tunnels in Switzerland.