Longest motorable road

The Pan-American Highway, from Fairbanks, Alaska, USA to Santiago, Chile, thence eastward to Buenos Aires, Argentina and terminating in Brasilia, Brazil is over 24,140km (15,000 miles) in length. There is, however, a small incomplete section in Panama and Colombia known as the Darién Gap. Although neither the USA nor Canada have officially named any of their highways as part of the Pan-American system, the route is commonly accepted to follow the so-called Alaska Highway from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Dawson Creek, British Columbia, Canada. Routes through western Canada and the USA provide the link to the Inter-American Highway, which runs from Mexico via Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica to Panama City, Panama. It is here that drivers encounter the Darién Gap, a stretch of rain forest around 110km (70 miles) which is the subject of heated debate between those who favor the completion of the road and those who oppose it for environmental reasons. After shipping their vehicles to Colombia or Venezuela, drivers can continue down the west coast of South America to Santiago, Chile, and then east to Bueno Aires, Argentia, and Rio de Janeiro and Brazilia in Brazil. Other branches of the highway lead to the Capitals of Paraguay (Asuncion), Venezuala (Caracas), and Bolivia (Sucre and La Paz). The idea of the highway was born in the late 1800s and it first began to take shape in 1925 with the first Pan American Highway Congress in Buenos Aires in 1925.