By the numbers
The world’s best driving roads, measured
We’ve mapped and measured 803 of the world’s greatest driving roads across 85 countries, 22,243 miles of tarmac in all. Every figure below is worked out from each road’s mapped line. 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 | Share | Roads | Miles | Avg. summit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 United Kingdom | 128 | 1,717 | 324 m | |
 United States | 123 | 4,339 | 1,511 m | |
 France | 64 | 1,007 | 1,410 m | |
 Italy | 57 | 791 | 1,727 m | |
 Japan | 29 | 443 | 1,357 m | |
 Switzerland | 28 | 388 | 1,892 m | |
 Spain | 27 | 385 | 1,290 m | |
 Germany | 26 | 468 | 841 m | |
 Austria | 23 | 298 | 1,799 m | |
 Norway | 18 | 618 | 645 m |
Across the continents
How the 803 roads spread across the world.
| Area | Share | Roads |
|---|---|---|
| Europe | 345 | |
| The Americas | 170 | |
| Britain & Ireland | 141 | |
| Asia | 81 | |
| Oceania | 32 | |
| Africa | 24 | |
| Middle East | 10 |
The typical great road
- Easy 78
- Moderate 383
- Demanding 295
- Expert 47
The average road in the catalogue runs 28 miles with a high point of 1,203 m, and the 4,345 hairpins work out at roughly 5 a road. By difficulty the split runs from 78 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. Where our measurement differs from the famous figure, we publish the measurement. 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 descriptions, editor notes and provenance research are original work and stay ours. For bulk or commercial use of the dataset, email simon@keane.studio. Road geometry is © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).