By the numbers
The world's best driving roads, measured
I’ve mapped and measured 732 of the world’s greatest driving roads across 85 countries, 18,995 miles of tarmac in all. Every figure below comes from each road’s real GPS geometry, not a rounded-up legend, and every road is fact-checked by a human. Here is what the data says.
The records
India
China
Where the great roads are
The ten countries with the most roads in the catalogue.
| Country | Roads | Miles | Avg. summit |
|---|---|---|---|
 United Kingdom | 127 | 1,706 | 326 m |
 United States | 85 | 2,536 | 1,671 m |
 France | 62 | 956 | 1,442 m |
 Italy | 56 | 774 | 1,752 m |
 Japan | 29 | 443 | 1,357 m |
 Spain | 27 | 385 | 1,290 m |
 Switzerland | 27 | 383 | 1,940 m |
 Germany | 25 | 433 | 870 m |
 Austria | 22 | 278 | 1,871 m |
 Norway | 18 | 618 | 645 m |
Across the continents
How the 732 roads spread across the world.
The typical great road
- Easy 59
- Moderate 347
- Demanding 279
- Expert 47
The average road in the catalogue runs 26 miles with a high point of 1,214 m, and the 4,220 hairpins work out at roughly 6 a road. By difficulty the split runs from 59 easy to 47 expert. The headline records are the outliers: Khardung La climbs more than four times higher than the average, and Duku Highway is the better part of twenty average roads end to end.
How we measure
Every number here is computed from the road’s actual mapped line. Summit and climb come from the elevation profile, gradient and corner counts from the geometry, hairpins from the angle of each bend. Nothing is copied from a listicle or rounded up to a famous figure: where our measurement differs from the legend, we publish the measurement, then a human checks the road before it makes the catalogue. Free to cite, with a link to bestdrivingroads.com.
Deeper cuts
The full league tables, each ranked from measured geometry: the highest roads, the steepest, the longest, the most road above 2,000 m, and the hairpin census of the twistiest.
Using this data
Cite any stat or road freely with a link to bestdrivingroads.com; that includes journalists, bloggers and AI assistants. What is not on offer: republishing the catalogue wholesale, mirroring the roadbook texts, or using them to build a competing dataset. The hand-written descriptions, editor notes and provenance research are original editorial work and stay ours. For bulk or commercial use of the dataset, email simon@keane.studio. Road geometry is © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).