Bragging rights or embarrassment? Katy Freeway at Beltway 8 is world's widest

Click through to see stunning aerials of Houston's busiest highways. Traffic on the IH-10 Katy Freeway viewed facing west near Loop 610 on Thursday, April 11, 2013, in Houston. ( Smiley N. Pool / Houston Chronicle ) less Click through to see stunning aerials of Houston's busiest highways. Traffic on the IH-10 Katy Freeway viewed facing west near Loop 610 on Thursday, April 11, 2013, in Houston. ( Smiley N. Pool / Houston ... more Photo: Smiley N. Pool, Houston Chronicle Photo: Smiley N. Pool, Houston Chronicle Image 1 of / 33 Caption Close Bragging rights or embarrassment? Katy Freeway at Beltway 8 is world's widest 1 / 33 Back to Gallery

If you subscribe to the theory that building bigger roads simply draws more traffic to fill the space, then Houston may be consigning itself to gridlock of global proportions.

For what it's worth, we can lay claim to the world's widest freeway: The Katy Freeway at Beltway 8 is 26 lanes across.

Here's how that breaks down: 12 main lanes (six in each direction), eight feeder lanes and six managed lanes. The managed lanes carry mass transit and high-occupancy vehicles during peak hours and are made available to single-occupancy vehicles for a toll fee during off-peak periods.

That 26-lane expanse earned the Katy a spot in Business Insider's post, "11 Wild Highways to Drive Before You Die."

Anthony Voigt, Houston-based program manager and research engineer for the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, said that if there's any freeway wider than the Katy, he hasn't heard of it.

"Including the frontage roads and managed lanes, I do believe that the Katy is the widest (by the metric of number of lanes) on the planet," Voigt said Wednesday by email.

A few other contenders come close to the title but don't quite make it, Voigt said, noting that the discussion had come up at the institute when the Katy widening project was completed in late 2008.

"Off the top of my head, the 401 in Toronto is 22 lanes at the widest and I think a part of the NJ (New Jersey) Turnpike is 18 lanes at one point," Voigt's email said.

A few other roads at the time were about 20 lanes wide, he said.

Some of the world's other extreme highways are:

- Pan American Highway, the world's longest, stretching 16,000 miles from Canada to Peru.

- Highway 401 in Ontario, Canada, North America's busiest, carrying about 420,000 vehicles per day.

- German autobahns, the world's fastest highways, with more than half of them having no speed limit.

- Boston's Big Dig, the most expensive highway project in history, costing nearly $15 billion.

- Bolivia's Yungas Road, the world's deadliest at just 10 feet wide.

- The Karakoram Highway between China and Pakistan, the world's highest paved highway at 16,000 feet.

Check out more incredible-but-true facts you probably didn't know about Houston in the slideshow above.