Road Tunnels in Sweden — Complete List by Length

• 27entries listed
• 4.5 kmlongest bore
• 1964–2018openings span
• 27.98 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

Where one of these 24 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for Sweden, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two. The 24 rows for Sweden are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2018 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

Lengths for Sweden are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 135 m and not a rounded figure. The longest entry is 33.3 times the shortest and 8.5 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

A new scheme in Sweden would have to beat 4.5 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The dated entries fall across 9 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 Södra Länken at 3.62 km and Muskö at 2.96 km. The table on this page runs to 27 rows and records Tunnel, Length (m), Date of opening, Län and Notes for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Dated entries run from 1964 to 2018, and the busiest decade is the 2000s with 10 recorded openings. Read down the length (m) column, the 27 values run from 135 m to 4 500 m with a midpoint at 735 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Reading the figures

Dates for Sweden refer to opening to traffic, not breakthrough, so the 1964 entry was under construction for some years before that. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 27.98 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

The shorter half of the table totals 3.52 km against 24.46 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows. Only 11 of the 27 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 13 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 10 distinct places and structures — Länken, Second and Södra among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The dated entries carry 9 distinct opening years across 54 years, and the median opening year is 2004. The material on this page is held in 12 captions rather than in running text, 116 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

They are not uniform: the fullest runs to 19 words and the briefest to 6, and on a page of this kind the long ones are where the explanation lives — the caption carries what the picture cannot. Ventilation and escape provision, not bore length, drive most of the cost on modern road tunnels in Sweden.