Worlds widest single carriageway?

[RJDG14]

In Myanmar (Burma) there is a new capital city called Naypyidaw where few people live and even less visit. Running past the Parliament building is an S20 road that looks like this



There's an article about the place in today's Independent

You might expect a road of these dimensions to have impressive GSJ's, but no. In fact there are some impressive T junction side roads, including one D2. At the western end the S20 road meets an S4 road at a T junction, which must be the mother of all T junctions.

Suspicion is this is a bit of future proofing in that the road is planned as a landing strip for a large aircraft for when the government has to be airlfted to safety when the uprising happens which would seem a sensible plan, if it weren't for the bend in the road.

Derek

It reminds me a lot of the kind of road that authoritarian regimes would use to host a massive military parade. Now that the junta has taken full control of Myanmar again, this kind of makes sense.

[Vierwielen]

The widest that I have seen was in 1980 between Bordj Mokhtar and Regane in Algeria. The 650 km road (or piste as it was called) traversed the Tanezrouft, (within the Sahara). At that time, the piste was demarcated by pairs of two 220 Litre oil drums, one on top of the other every 500 metres. There was no surfacing whatsoever - you just drove across the desert sand from oil drum to oil drum. If the lorries that did traverse the desert broke up the sand too much, you just moved over to the right a bit. As a result the piste was often a hundred metres wide. Apart from a wadi (dried up river bed) with a few dried-out plants, some 20 km north of Bordj Mokhtar, there was no sign of any vegetation whatsoever for most of the trip.

When I crossed into Algeria at Bordj Mokhtar, I saw a few Paris-Dakar rally cars travelling southwards. I later learnt that a particular Britihs driver managed to get lost on that rally. When I looked at Google Maps to see what the road was like these days, it appears to have been tarmaced, so its width has shrunk dramatically. Furthermore, according to ViaMichelin, the 630 km journey can be done in 7h13 (plus stops) - it took our party two full days with an overnight stop in the middle of the desert.