Bridges and Viaducts in the United States by Deck Length

• 77entries listed
• 38.42 kmlongest bore
• 1883–2006openings span
• 267.36 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

The shortest recorded entry is 1.03 km against 38.42 km at the top, a spread of 37.30x across the same table. The three longest entries alone account for 60.99 km of the 267.36 km on this page, which is 23 per cent of the total from 3 of 77 rows.

Where one of these 77 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for the United States, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two. Dates for the United States refer to opening to traffic, not breakthrough, so the 1883 entry was under construction for some years before that.

10 of the 77 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 267.36 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

A new scheme in the United States would have to beat 38.42 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The shorter half of the table totals 62.28 km against 205.08 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows.

The 77 rows for the United States are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2006 opening sits well down the table without being any less current. Eighth on the list is Albemarle Sound at 5.63 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure.

Reading the figures

Dated entries run from 1883 to 2006, and the busiest decade is the 1960s with 12 recorded openings. The material on this page is held in 7 captions rather than in running text, 57 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

The longest stands 27.12 km clear of the next longest, which is the margin to watch when a new scheme is announced. The captions name 10 distinct places and structures — Rafael, Grace and Charleston among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

After the 1960s the next busiest decade here is the 2000s with 9 openings, so the building effort came in more than one wave. The bridge/viaduct column names 77 distinct entries on this page, Lake Pontchartrain Causeway and San Mateo-Hayward among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

The table on this page runs to 77 rows and records Bridge/Viaduct, 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. A long viaduct on modest piers can therefore outrank a shorter but far more dramatic single-span crossing.

Bridges and viaducts are listed by total deck length, not by main span. A tunnel list for the United States reads differently from a neighbouring country's: 27 of these 77 structures pass three kilometres, and the same journey time is bought with one long bore in one country and a dozen short ones in another.