When your country hosts at least tens of millions of people, or hundreds of millions in many cases, you need one of the 10 longest highways in the world to connect them. Some of the largest countries in the world, such as the United States, Canada, China, and India have trouble with transportation. After all, airfare is often too inconvenient and expensive for travels. Interconnecting roads present a different hassle, as traffic signals and changing roads can significantly increase the time taken to travel when the route is thousands of kilometers long. Thus, these countries faced a dilemma. To combat this issue, the nations set about constructing highways thousands of kilometers long. These structures are the pinnacle of engineering and represent feats in technology people would have scoffed at initially. These were initially constructed to allow people who lived on the outskirts of cities or the rural areas to easily travel to the bigger cities where they would often find employment.
Of course, some countries weren’t simply content with highways connecting their cities; some countries wanted to be connected to other countries by road as well. This led to the creation of the Pan American highway, which was created to connect nearly all of the countries in both South and North America. An incredible 21 countries are connected by this monstrous highway, which took decades to be completed.
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Highways aren’t only beneficial because they reduce the time taken to travel significant distances. Since the roads are smooth and you can drive at a continuous speed for hundreds if not thousands of miles, it significantly improves your fuel efficiency when compared with a car which has to stop and start consistently. Furthermore, driving in a city or small roads often results in you driving your car in a pothole or a rough part of the road, which can be disastrous for the suspension. Since highways are so smooth and their maintenance is so prompt, your car will fare much better there.
The United States, which has the most number of highways on the list of 10 longest highways in the world, has a storied history regarding the construction of highways. When the suburbs started becoming popular post-World War II, traffic also increased significantly which led to city planners worrying that their city was becoming “unhealthy.” This, combined with the fact that the federal government offered to cover up to 90 percent of the cost of constructing a highway, saw many such city planners beginning to build highways.
Of course, building a highway is not just a long and arduous task, but extremely expensive as well, and the bigger the highway, the greater the cost of building it. This is why some of the highways on our list are also among the 10 Most Expensive Highways in the World. To confirm the longest highways, we used The Mesh News, Rediff and ABC Newspoint.
