Road Tunnels in the Netherlands — Complete List by Length

• 56entries listed
• 7.03 kmlongest bore
• 1940–2011openings span
• 49.92 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

The entries sum to roughly 49.92 km of bore, an average of about 0.96 km each, though that average describes no actual row. Lengths for the Netherlands are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 30 m and not a rounded figure.

The median entry measures 0.8 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. The shortest recorded entry is 0.03 km against 7.03 km at the top, a spread of 234.17x across the same table.

The three longest entries alone account for 11.57 km of the 49.92 km on this page, which is 23 per cent of the total from 3 of 52 rows. 26 entries sit above the median and 26 at or below it, so the table is evenly weighted and not clustered at one end.

A new scheme in the Netherlands would have to beat 7.03 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. 12 of the 52 entries fall within a quarter of the median length, which is how tightly this particular list clusters around its typical structure.

This page records the road tunnels catalogued for the Netherlands in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 49.92 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Reading the figures

Dated entries run from 1940 to 2011, and the busiest decade is the 2000s with 15 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 41 rows and records Tunnel, Length (m), Date of opening, Prov. and Notes for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

The dated entries carry 25 distinct opening years across 71 years, and the median opening year is 1996. Read down the length (m) column, the 41 values run from 30 m to 6 650 m with a midpoint at 569 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Roughly 17 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 37 distinct places and structures — Canal, Maas and Nieuwe among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The earliest dated entry is Maas, opened in 1940, and the most recent is Maastricht traverse in 2011. The material on this page is held in 40 captions rather than in running text, 399 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

The ten longest average 2.3 km against 0.64 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution. The tunnel column names 41 distinct entries on this page, Westerschelde and Roer among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.