The Victorian Government data portal has lots of great information available for anyone to use. One of the more commonly-used datasets is the Vicmap Transport series, especially the one containing information on gazetted roads. It also contains trails, tracks and even ferry routes.

This is the first in a series of posts on road names in Melbourne and Victoria.

Using this data it’s fairly easily to work out the longest road name in different areas.

Note that I’m only counting characters in the actual name, not including the suffix (i.e. ‘road’, ‘street’, ‘highway’, etc.).

If we’re not limiting ourselves in what’s considered a ‘road’ for our purposes, then the title for the longest road name goes to the Selby Conservation Northern Fire Access Track at 39 characters.

If we slightly tighten the criteria to only include public roads, then the Portsea Ocean Beach Access Upper Road in Portsea wins out at 32 characters.

If we exclude access roads and tracks, then there are two in equal first with 27 characters. The Kangaroo Ground – Wattle Glen Road and Mount Disappointment Forest Drive.

The top eight with these criteria are:

Finally, if we limit ourselves to the longest single word in any road name, then Heidelberg – Warrandyte Road wins out at 21 characters in a single word (a hyphen technically makes it one word, and we love compound words in Australian English…)

But if we exclude hyphens, then there are a couple in equal first place with 14 characters each:

You can download and explore the data yourself on the Victorian Government data portal here.