Road Tunnels in Austria — Complete List by Length, Part 500

• 100entries listed
• 0.95 kmlongest bore
• 1947–2015openings span
• 55.89 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

Where one of these 81 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for Austria, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two. The 81 rows for Austria are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2015 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

Lengths for Austria are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 500 m and not a rounded figure. The longest entry is 1.9 times the shortest and 1.4 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

A new scheme in Austria would have to beat 0.95 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The dated entries fall across 32 different years, which is a rough measure of whether this was a sustained programme or a handful of separate schemes.

Second and third place go to Mathon Ost at 0.95 km and Geistal-Vergröss at 0.95 km. The table on this page runs to 100 rows and records Tunnel, Length (m), Date of opening, Land and Bezirk for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

The longest stands 0 km clear of the next longest, which is the margin to watch when a new scheme is announced. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 55.89 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Reading the figures

Eighth on the list is Vösendorf UT at 0.9 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure. The ten longest average 0.92 km against 0.66 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution.

Dated entries run from 1947 to 2015, and the busiest decade is the 2000s with 26 recorded openings. The material on this page is held in 5 captions rather than in running text, 38 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

Roughly 31 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 4 distinct places and structures — Kufstein, Private and Kaiser among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The dated entries carry 32 distinct opening years across 68 years, and the median opening year is 1996. Read down the length (m) column, the 100 values run from 500 m to 984 m with a midpoint at 658 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Further down the table, Kremsursprung is recorded at 0.92 km and Nassereith at 0.92 km. 77 of the 100 rows carry an entry in the notes column — 77 per cent of the table — and that column is where the qualifications live: tube counts, closures, boundaries and the reason a figure reads the way it does.