10 longest road tunnels in the world that took decades to build

Roads are one of the major part of infrastructure that tells about a nation’s reality. All around the world, every nation tries to give its people advanced road infrastructure for commuting. Do you know which are the longest tunnels in the world? These tunnels are incredible time savers. From the use of neon blue mountain caves, which are built to keep drivers from falling asleep in Norway, to the cutting-edge highways that lie below the skyscrapers of Tokyo, there are many examples of how humans have created ways to work around and through Earth’s various obstacles with the help of tunnels. Here is the list of the longest, deepest, and most scenic road tunnels in the world.

The Lærdal Tunnel is the longest road tunnel in the entire world, connecting the towns of Lærdal and Aurland together as one city. To reduce driver fatigue while travelling through the 20-minute tunnel, engineers included four sections of the tunnel, with three large mountain caves in each section, containing overcast lighting in the style of blue and yellow light to mimic the rise of the sun, as a way to allow drivers a break from their mental state.

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WestConnex is Australia’s most extensive road construction project and provides critical access to Sydney’s motorway system through underground tunnels. They do this using high-tech LED safety signs and monitoring systems for air quality. The tunnels are also designed to help ease traffic congestion by allowing users to bypass hundreds of traffic signals, reducing travel times for tens of thousands of commuters every day in the greater Sydney metropolitan area.

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The Yamate tunnel is the longest urban road tunnel globally and runs deep below central Tokyo as part of the Shuto Expressway. Construction required innovative engineering to navigate through existing subway lines and other utility networks. Large ventilation towers and automated fire suppression systems were implemented to ensure the safety and well-being of an extremely high number of urban road users.

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The two-bore tunnel under the Qinling Mountains has garnered international acclaim due to its use of psychological design elements to ease driver anxiety while driving along this route. Each area within the tunnel has been decorated with an array of fake plants, flowers, and decorative lighting that provides an impression of sky above when viewed from inside the tunnel, making it one of the longest tunnels in the world built through mountains.

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An example of remarkable deep mountain engineering, the Jinpingshan Tunnel exhibits an incomparably large volume of rock above it, as its deepest portion has over 2300 meters of rock above it. The Jinping Mountain Tunnel was primarily constructed as part of the Jinping Hydropower Project, allowing fast access between adjacent remote areas where high-pressure geologic zones exist. The tunnel allows fast and reliable transportation for industrial purposes and personal transportation to various locations through the rugged section of the Yalong River.

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The Gotthard Road Tunnel (1980) was built within the heart of the Swiss Alps as an essential method of connecting northern and southern Europe. The Gotthard Road Tunnel is an international roadway, containing a single barrel for traffic in both directions (bilateral operation), with sophisticated means of providing adequate airflow to the inside of the Gotthard Road Tunnel from the sports dome above it.

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The Tiantaishan Tunnel is heroically arranged on the Baoji-Pingkan Expressway, i.e. it creates extreme proportions of mountain crossings (specifically through the Qinling Mountain Range) by boasting six lanes total (three for entry & three for exit; hence why there are two separate tunnels). This tunnelling project pressed on rapidly due to construction having utilised modern mechanical tunnelling techniques to overcome historically challenging geo-geographic structuring while maintaining high-speed safety standards related to regional transportation.

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The Muzhailing Tunnel (located in Gansu Province) has set new standards for high-altitude engineering to address historical circumstances of geological stress, founding difficulties, geographic separation, as well as difficulty across the length of its existing structure, during the course of its building; ultimately allowing for the final connection of previously isolated communities located in the mountains above. This finally resolved one of China’s most challenging bottleneck situations associated with China’s national expressway system, through the environmentally sensitive and geologically complex Gansu Province.

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The Zigana Tunnel replaces and effectively bypasses the once-dangerous Zigana Pass on the safest road route (all-weather) through Turkey’s eastern Pontic Mountains, and is now considered to be the longest road tunnel in Turkiye and a premier engineering feat in the Middle East region, significantly shortening the transit between the Black Sea and Eastern Anatolia.

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With a maximum depth of 292 meters below sea level, the Ryfylke Tunnel in Norway is built to be the world’s longest and deepest underwater road tunnel. As part of a new route called Solbakk-Stavanger, it has replaced earlier ferry routes through Ryfylke with a very fast travel time on a completely new underground road. Its engineering was done with extreme care to account for the significant pressure experienced under the sea, as well as providing a safe slope for vehicles through the tunnel.

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