If you want to travel to places in a car, it’s important to have a road. That is just a fact. Engineers have been building roads since ancient people crossed well-worn paths between settlements But today, our roads are much longer, some of them traversing thousands of miles of terrain that would be nearly uncrossable without them. Here are the six longest roads humans have built to date.
1. The Pan-American Highway
The Pan-American Highway is the longest road in the world, according to the Guinness World Records. Covering almost 19,000 miles from the Arctic Ocean at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to the southernmost tip of South America, it winds through 14 countries and a dizzying variety of landscapes and terrain, from arctic tundra to tropical rainforests. Travelers of the Pan-American Highway must be ready to drive up the 11,322-foot (3,450-meter) mountain peak called Cerro de la Muerte— or Summit of Death — in Costa Rica, and then brave the Darién Gap, about 60 miles (97 kilometers) between Panama and Colombia, which remains unpaved.
2. Highway One
In Australia, they call the 9,000-mile (14,500-kilometer) Highway One”The Big Lap”because it hugs the coast of the entire continent. It passes through every state in Australia and connects seven of its eight capitals, even popping over the Bass Strait to Tasmania.
Construction on Highway One started in 1955, and it’s now the world’s longest continuous road, with over a million Australians traveling on it every day.
3.The Trans-Siberian Highway
The Trans-Siberian Highway is a 6,800-mile (11,000-kilometer) route across Russia, from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok. Construction on the Trans-Siberian began in 1949, but most of this patchwork of federal highways is relatively new, only becoming fully paved in 2015. It touches both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans
4.The Trans-Canada Highway
The Trans-Canada Highway is the second-longest national highway in the world, spanning 4,645 miles (7,476 kilometers) of the country and running east to west, between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It links all major cities and passes through every Canadian province. Upon its completion in 1971, it was the longest continuous highway in the world.
Building a highway across Canada wasn’t an easy feat, due to the country’s rugged terrain. In 1912, a group of automobile buffs offered a gold medal to anyone who could drive a car from Halifax to Vancouver. The first man who completed the challenge did it in two months, but he didn’t win the medal because large portions of the journey involved his car strapped to a railcar or on the deck of a ship. Today the Trans-Canada Highway is driveable in 57 hours.
5. Golden Quadrilateral Highway Network
The fabulously named Golden Quadrilateral Highway Network is, as the name implies, a 3,633-mile (5,846-kilometer) network of highways that forms a four-sided polygon and connects the four major Indian cities of Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai. It was built to cut down the travel time between the major cities, as well as to provide a way for people in more rural parts of the country to bring agricultural goods to markets. This relatively new highway system, completed in 2012, is big by any highway’s standards much of it features between four and six lanes.
6. China National Highway 318
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