Road Tunnels in Canada — Complete List by Length

• 12entries listed
• 1.56 kmlongest bore
• 1929–1986openings span
• 9.61 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

Between the longest and the tenth-longest the drop is 1.34 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens. Where one of these 11 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for Canada, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two.

Lengths for Canada are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 220 m and not a rounded figure. The 11 rows for Canada are ordered by length, not by date, so the 1986 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

A new scheme in Canada would have to beat 1.56 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The longest entry is 7.1 times the shortest and 2.0 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

Dated entries run from 1929 to 1986, and the busiest decade is the 1960s with 2 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 15 rows and records State, Tunnel, Length (m), Year of opening and Province for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Dates for Canada refer to opening to traffic, not breakthrough, so the 1929 entry was under construction for some years before that. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 9.61 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Reading the figures

The dated entries carry 7 distinct opening years across 57 years, and the median opening year is 1967. Read down the length (m) column, the 12 values run from 220 m to 8 400 m with a midpoint at 820 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

The province column sorts these 15 rows into 3 groups, the largest being QBC with 7, then BRC with 4 and ONT with 4. Only 4 of the 15 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.

Roughly 0 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 7 distinct places and structures — Welland, Montreal and Canada among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The material on this page is held in 7 captions rather than in running text, 71 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together. Ventilation and escape provision, not bore length, drive most of the cost on modern road tunnels in Canada.

One of those 12 is recorded as under construction or planned, Fannin at 8.4 km, so the count includes it while every measured figure — the range, the median, the total — describes the 11 rows carrying traffic today: an unopened bore cannot hold a record. Road tunnel lengths are measured portal to portal along the carriageway.