How many miles of road are there in the world?
How many miles of road are there in the world?
about 64 million km — roughly 40 million miles
The world's roads laid end to end would reach the Moon and back 83 times, or wrap the equator about 1,600 times.
National road inventories add up to roughly 64 million km of roads worldwide, of which perhaps 60% is paved. The United States has about 6.6 million km and India about 6.4 million, the two largest networks, though India's includes a great deal of unsurfaced rural road. Comparison between countries is unreliable because the definition of a countable road varies: some nations include every farm track and others count only maintained public highway.
How the figure is arrived at
National transport ministries report network length to the CIA World Factbook and equivalent compilations, usually split into paved and unpaved. Increasingly these are cross-checked against OpenStreetMap, which in some countries now maps more road than the official register lists.
How confident it is
- Low estimate
- 60,000,000
- High estimate
- 70,000,000
- Spread
- 1.2× between the bounds
Other things people built counts
- How many countries are there in the world? 195 — or 193, or 206, or 249, depending on who is counting
- How many cars are there in the world? about 1.5 billion motor vehicles
- How many planes are in the air right now? roughly 10,000 to 20,000 at any moment
- How many languages are there in the world? about 7,150 living languages
- How many McDonald's are there? about 43,000 in over 100 countries
- How many phones are there in the world? about 8.9 billion mobile connections — more than there are people
- How many nuclear weapons are there? about 12,200 warheads
- How many websites are there? about 1.1 billion hostnames — but only around 200 million active
- How many books have ever been published? about 130 million as of 2010 — probably over 200 million now
- How many airports are there in the world? about 45,000 with runways — but only around 4,000 with scheduled airline service
- How many ATMs are there in the world? about 3 million
- How many cities are there in the world? about 10,000 with over 50,000 people; 33 megacities over 10 million
- How many buildings are there in the world? somewhere between 1.5 and 4 billion
- How many computers are there in the world? roughly 2 billion personal computers in use
Common questions
- How many miles of road are there in the world?
- about 64 million km — roughly 40 million miles
- How is that estimated?
- National transport ministries report network length to the CIA World Factbook and equivalent compilations, usually split into paved and unpaved. Increasingly these are cross-checked against OpenStreetMap, which in some countries now maps more road than the official register lists.
Related pages
- How many countries are there in the world? 195 — or 193, or 206, or 249, depending on who is counting
- How many cars are there in the world? about 1.5 billion motor vehicles
- How many planes are in the air right now? roughly 10,000 to 20,000 at any moment
- How many languages are there in the world? about 7,150 living languages
- How many McDonald's are there? about 43,000 in over 100 countries
- How many phones are there in the world? about 8.9 billion mobile connections — more than there are people
- How many nuclear weapons are there? about 12,200 warheads
- How many websites are there? about 1.1 billion hostnames — but only around 200 million active
- How many people are there in the world? Living things and the natural world
- How many stars are there in the universe? Space and the universe
- How many bones are in the human body? The human body
- How many grains of sand are there on Earth? Living things and the natural world
- How many ants are there in the world? Living things and the natural world
- How many trees are there in the world? Living things and the natural world
Sources
- The World Factbook — Central Intelligence Agency (Public domain (US Government))