Road Tunnels in South Korea — Complete List by Length

• 42entries listed
• 4.6 kmlongest bore
• 1970–2009openings span
• 58.26 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

The median entry measures 1.18 km, so half the table sits below that and half above, which is a better guide to the typical structure here than the headline figure. The shortest recorded entry is 0.15 km against 4.6 km at the top, a spread of 30.07x across the same table.

The middle half of the table runs from 0.62 km to 1.86 km, and that band is where most of the engineering on this page actually sits. Between the longest and the tenth-longest the drop is 2.74 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens.

The three longest entries alone account for 13.58 km of the 58.26 km on this page, which is 23 per cent of the total from 3 of 38 rows. 19 entries sit above the median and 19 at or below it, so the table is evenly weighted and not clustered at one end.

This page records the road tunnels catalogued for South Korea in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 58.26 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 Neungdong at 4.58 km and Ch’oup at 4.4 km. Read down the length (m) column, the 42 values run from 153 m to 6 400 m with a midpoint at 1 305 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Reading the figures

Dated entries run from 1970 to 2009, and the busiest decade is the 2000s with 7 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 42 rows and records Tunnel, Length (m), Year of opening, Province and Notes for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

A new scheme in South Korea would have to beat 4.6 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. 8 of the 38 entries fall within a quarter of the median length, which is how tightly this particular list clusters around its typical structure.

The 38 rows for South Korea are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2009 opening sits well down the table without being any less current. The ten longest average 3.28 km against 0.91 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution.

The shorter half of the table totals 11.99 km against 46.26 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows. Only 5 of the 42 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.

The dated entries carry 12 distinct opening years across 39 years, and the median opening year is 1999. The material on this page is held in 8 captions rather than in running text, 58 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.