Road Tunnels Longer Than 4000 Metres — a Ranked Reference List

• 98entries listed
• 4.98 kmlongest bore
• 1939–2016openings span
• 430.44 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

The middle half of the table runs from 4.15 km to 4.61 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 0.12 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens.

This page records the road tunnels catalogued for the world in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 430.44 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

The three longest entries alone account for 14.85 km of the 430.44 km on this page, which is 3 per cent of the total from 3 of 98 rows. The shorter half of the table totals 203.14 km against 227.3 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows.

Further down the table, Miaoliang is recorded at 4.92 km and Eikefet at 4.91 km. Read down the length column, the 98 values run from 4 000 m to 4 975 m with a midpoint at 4 312 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Second and third place go to Vágatunnilin at 4.94 km and Qinling Sanhao at 4.93 km. The material on this page is held in 22 captions rather than in running text, 146 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

Reading the figures

Roughly 27 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 13 distinct places and structures — Expressway, Zürich and Fengjie among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

Lengths for the world are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 4 000 m and not a rounded figure. After the 1990s the next busiest decade here is the 2000s with 19 openings, so the building effort came in more than one wave.

The 98 rows for the world are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2016 opening sits well down the table without being any less current. The ten longest average 4.91 km against 4.33 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution.

The table on this page runs to 98 rows and records Country, Tunnel, Length, Date of opening and Notes for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here. Length is a proxy for terrain rather than for difficulty, and the correlation is weaker than a ranking implies.

The longest entry is 1.2 times the shortest and 1.2 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is. The tunnel column names 98 distinct entries on this page, Branisko and Vágatunnilin among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.