Road Tunnels in Mexico — Complete List by Length

• 78entries listed
• 2.95 kmlongest bore
• 1902–2013openings span
• 32.7 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 2.14 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens. Where one of these 77 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for Mexico, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two.

Lengths for Mexico are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 90 m and not a rounded figure. The 77 rows for Mexico are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2013 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

A new scheme in Mexico would have to beat 2.95 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The longest entry is 32.8 times the shortest and 11.6 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

Dates for Mexico refer to opening to traffic, not breakthrough, so the 1902 entry was under construction for some years before that. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 32.7 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Dated entries run from 1902 to 2013, and the busiest decade is the 2010s with 66 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 87 rows and records Tunnel, 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.

Reading the figures

The dated entries carry 8 distinct opening years across 111 years, and the median opening year is 2013. Read down the length (m) column, the 78 values run from 90 m to 2 950 m with a midpoint at 260 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Eighth on the list is Xicotepec II at 0.89 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure. The ten longest average 1.52 km against 0.26 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution.

Roughly 66 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 19 distinct places and structures — Nuevo, Necaxa-Tihuatlan and Necaxa-Avila 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 14 captions rather than in running text, 144 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 Mexico.

One of those 78 is recorded as under construction or planned, Coatzacoalcos at 1.6 km, so the count includes it while every measured figure — the range, the median, the total — describes the 77 rows carrying traffic today: an unopened bore cannot hold a record. Road tunnel lengths are measured portal to portal along the carriageway.