Where Data Tells the Story
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The world’s longest highway is in Australia.
It is 14,500 kilometers long and goes nowhere in particular because it is a loop. Highway 1 circles the entire Australian continent, connecting every mainland state and territory capital along a coastal route with no start and no end.
This visualization ranks the top 15 longest highways on Earth. It is based on data from the national transport authority, the United Nations transport network designations, and published road statistics, gathered by Wikipedia.
The Pan-American Highway is supposed to run continuously from Alaska to the southern tip of South America.
That is, a single route connecting the entire Western Hemisphere by road.
It does not, because of 96 kilometers of jungle.
The Darién Gap, on the Panama-Colombia border, has never been paved. It is a stretch of roadless rainforest and swamp that the two countries have declined to bridge since the highway concept was first proposed in the 1920s.
Panama and Colombia have both cited the Darién National Park (a UNESCO World Heritage site) as the primary justification.
The gap has also served as a natural barrier against the spread of foot-and-mouth disease from South American livestock into Central and North America.
If complete, a continuous Pan-American Highway would run approximately 21,100 kilometers, easily surpassing Australia’s loop as the longest road on earth.