Road Tunnels Longer Than 5000 Metres — a Ranked Reference List

• 203entries listed
• 9.92 kmlongest bore
• 1948–2019openings span
• 1099.85 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

The median entry measures 6.11 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. 85 entries sit above the median and 85 at or below it, so the table is evenly weighted and not clustered at one end.

The middle half of the table runs from 5.47 km to 7.27 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 1.1 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens.

The three longest entries alone account for 29.27 km of the 1099.85 km on this page, which is 3 per cent of the total from 3 of 170 rows. The shorter half of the table totals 467.15 km against 632.7 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows.

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 1099.85 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Lengths for the world are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 5 000 m and not a rounded figure. After the 2010s the next busiest decade here is the 2000s with 51 openings, so the building effort came in more than one wave.

Reading the figures

Further down the table, Mælefjell is recorded at 9.4 km and Seelisberg at 9.29 km. Read down the length column, the 197 values run from 5 000 m to 9 919 m with a midpoint at 6 308 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Second and third place go to Zhongtiaoshan at 9.77 km and Tokyo Aqua at 9.58 km. The material on this page is held in 66 captions rather than in running text, 568 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

Dated entries run from 1948 to 2019, and the busiest decade is the 2010s with 60 recorded openings. They are not uniform: the fullest runs to 29 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.

Roughly 111 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 90 distinct places and structures — Expressway, Route and Subaqueous among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The 170 rows for the world are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2019 opening sits well down the table without being any less current. The ten longest average 9.35 km against 6.29 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution.