Road Tunnels in New Zealand — Complete List by Length

• 7entries listed
• 1.9 kmlongest bore
• 1900–1964openings span
• 4.4 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

Second and third place go to Homer at 1.2 km and Mount Victoria at 0.6 km. The table on this page runs to 9 rows and records Tunnel, Length (m), Year of opening, Region and Notes for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

The entries sum to roughly 4.4 km of bore, an average of about 0.63 km each, though that average describes no actual row. Lengths for New Zealand are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 74 m and not a rounded figure.

Dated entries run from 1900 to 1964, and the busiest decade is the 1900s with 2 recorded openings. Read down the length (m) column, the 7 values run from 74 m to 1 900 m with a midpoint at 389 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

The median entry measures 0.39 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 0.07 km against 1.9 km at the top, a spread of 25.68x across the same table.

5 entries fall below a kilometre, short enough that portals and approaches usually decided their cost more than the bore itself. The year of opening column runs from 12 to 1971 across 5 dated rows, and the 1950s alone account for 1 of them, so the building effort here came in waves rather than evenly.

Reading the figures

A new scheme in New Zealand would have to beat 1.9 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. 1 of the 7 entries fall within a quarter of the median length, which is how tightly this particular list clusters around its typical structure.

The dated entries carry 6 distinct opening years across 64 years, and the median opening year is 1931. The material on this page is held in 4 captions rather than in running text, 28 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

After the 1900s the next busiest decade here is the 1920s with 1 openings, so the building effort came in more than one wave. Only 5 of the 9 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 7 rows for New Zealand are ordered by length, not by date, so the 1964 opening sits well down the table without being any less current. The tunnel column names 9 distinct entries on this page, Lyttelton and Homer among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

The longest entry is Lyttelton, at 1.9 km, opened in 1964. A tunnel list for New Zealand reads differently from a neighbouring country's: 0 of these 7 structures pass three kilometres, and the same journey time is bought with one long bore in one country and a dozen short ones in another.