Road Tunnels in the United States — Complete List by Length, Part 000

• 137entries listed
• 0.95 kmlongest bore
• 1914–2007openings span
• 37.81 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

Where one of these 136 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 1914 entry was under construction for some years before that.

Lengths for the United States are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 23 m and not a rounded figure. The shorter half of the table totals 7.42 km against 30.39 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows.

Dated entries run from 1914 to 2007, and the busiest decade is the 2000s with 10 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 137 rows and records Tunnel, Length (m), Date of opening, State and Comment for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Second and third place go to Battery Park at 0.95 km and Alaskan Way at 0.89 km. Read down the length (m) column, the 137 values run from 23 m to 948 m with a midpoint at 180 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

A new scheme in the United States would have to beat 0.95 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. After the 2000s the next busiest decade here is the 1930s with 6 openings, so the building effort came in more than one wave.

Reading the figures

The 136 rows for the United States are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2007 opening sits well down the table without being any less current. Eighth on the list is Luther Burbank at 0.85 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure.

This page records the road tunnels catalogued for the United States in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. The captions name 7 distinct places and structures — City, Mobile and River among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

One of those 137 is recorded as under construction or planned, measuring 0.61 km, so the count includes it while every measured figure — the range, the median, the total — describes the 136 rows carrying traffic today: an unopened bore cannot hold a record. Road tunnel lengths are measured portal to portal along the carriageway.

The dated entries carry 26 distinct opening years across 93 years, and the median opening year is 1970. The material on this page is held in 10 captions rather than in running text, 68 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

The state column sorts these 137 rows into 26 groups, the largest being CA with 59, then NC with 26 and IL with 7. Only 57 of the 137 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.