I would guess 200 miles, which is easy to do in Alaska and Canadian Territories.
Driving the AlCan in December at night 25 years ago I probably went 125+ miles w/o seeing a car but the distance is just a guess now. I did come across a guy and his dog that had driven off the road and gotton stuck so deep his car wasn’t visible, so I took them back 20 miles to a tavern but I continued all the way to Fort St. John before finally seeing a vehicle. Bizarrely, I’d just nipped the snow covered shoulder and gotton stuck myself when 2 minutes later a truck came by, first vehicle I’d seen in probably 6 hours. He popped me right out with a special elastic tow rope and I was back on my way 10 minutes after augering in. Supremely lucky timing there.
It’s pretty easy to drive for extended periods in the American West in broad daylight without seeing another person – lots and lots of wide open spaces. I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve driven at least 50 miles in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nebraska, New Mexico or Nevada without seeing another vehicle.
Personally, I think the longest I’ve driven without seeing another vehicle may have been between Winnemucca and McDermitt, Nevada – it’s about 75 miles on Highway 95. With all apologies to the folks who may live on the Fort Winnemucca Indian Reservation just south of McDermitt, that drive is what I think of whenever I hear the word “godforsaken.”
A close second would be between Thedford and Valentine, Nebraska on Highway 83; it’s about 65 miles. My father-in-law grew up in rural Nebraska, and he said there are lots of “lonely roads” out there. He’s absolutely right.
120 kilometers.
Mr_nz and I were on holiday in New Zealand and we decided to take a scenic route even though it wasn’t a very sunny day. We drove past a sign.
minute one: comfortable silence
minute two: comfortable silence
minute three: slightly uncomfortable silence
minute four: discomfort increases
minute five: “That sign didn’t say 120km of gravel road, did it?”
For some ridiculous reason, we ended up agreeing that we had *both *misread the sign and it must have said 12km, not 120km.
We hit gravel road. It starts to rain. There are hills in the distance. Well, there are the bottoms of hills. We can’t see how far they go up because the clouds are so low. We hit the hills. Still gravel.
We spend the next 100km carefully navigating around the windiest graveliest hilliest roads that I have ever experienced in my life. The rain is absolutely lashing down and there’s very little visibility. Max speed is around 30km per hour.
Several hours later, the clouds finally lift and we find ourselves in the most stunning part of the country that I have ever seen. I’d love to tell you where it was, but I have absolutely no idea. Somewhere between Napier and Auckland.
We stop the car on the side of the road, which is in fact the edge of a steep cliff. There’s a lake at the bottom of the cliff, surrounded by hills covered in forest and ferns. It is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. This is in an age before mobile phones and we didn’t even have a camera to snap a photo. But I still have a mental picture of that beautiful place… that I never, ever, ever, want to travel to again.
In the early 90s when the Haul Road up to the North Slope was still private I’d drive samples from our camp at Happy Valley up to Deadhorse. Judging by the names I was going the wrong direction. 
That was 80 miles and it was common not to see another vehicle the entire trip or to see anyone travelling south from HV toward Atigun Pass either, just lots of caribou, the occasional grizzly and sometimes small herds of musk ox. It was beautiful, especially when the summer sun dropped low but never quite reached the horizon. You felt like you had an entire country all to yourself.
I wish I could remember my own PR because this is a fun and interesting question. It may have been U.S. 26 through the open range country of western Wyoming. That’s a logical guess but, honestly, I have no idea.
Ooh … I think I might have this one. Several years back, I travelled from Fort St. John, BC to Whitehorse, YK for my brother-in-laws wedding. I left around six pm, and there was occasional traffic, mostly big rigs, until I hit Fort Nelson. After that, I didn’t see a single vehicle on the road between Fort Nelson and just outside Whitehorse. According to google maps, that’s a distance of 961 KM. (591 Miles) To be fair, the drive back during the day had some traffic, so this was partially due to the time I was driving.
The usual way of driving from Boston to Montreal is I-93 to I-89 to the border, but once I stayed on 93 to Franconia Notch (which was beautiful) where 93 cuts down to one lane in each direction (and changes its designation to US-3) and I think I must have gone 10 miles without seeing another car.
The area of SE Oregon/SW Idaho. Hard to say with Google Maps. It doesn’t want to take me on the “roads” we went on. At least 50 mi, maybe as much as 60-70. Journeys of 30 mi without seeing anyone else are everyday experiences in many parts of Eastern Oregon.
That’s changed quite a bit since then. We drove it in our RV somewhere in the first decade of this century, and while there were long stretches of alone, you do run into haul trucks and pump station pickups. Now they take tour buses up the damn thing.
I’d say the drive up the Dempster Highway to Inuvik, YT is pretty lonely, but I couldn’t say how long a stretch without seeing another car.
I remember driving across North Dakota in the winter back in the 70s without seeing another soul for long periods of time.
Eastern Oregon is particularly desolate at night because thanks to the law against self-serve gas, there’s HUGE stretches of highway out there without 24-hour gas.
They actually just modified the law slightly to allow self-serve gas in rural counties, but I imagine it’ll take a while for the self-serve pumps to go in.
I would say 35-40 miles but it was rural Texas and many years ago.
I’m a city man myself, so I don’t have anything recent. But it was weird traveling across the USA in the 70’s and never being out of site of a light.
In Melbourne, you go an hour out of the city and you’re nowhere. You go another hour, and it’s even more nowhere. You go another hour… and it just keeps getting less, and less, and less. When you drive out, you don’t come to another place: you just get further away.
That is a wonderful way to describe the feeling.
As an American who knows and loves wide open empty spaces, this makes me dream of even wider Australia, and feel a bit like :
Well the Nullarbor springs to mind but generally there are vehicles every so often- semis etc if you count them as other cars.
However, I’m sure that if you went to Birdsville and some really remote places you could go a fair distance without seeing a vehicle (I have never done it) - and I assume we are talking public roads?
However, even in remote parts of the Northern Territory and the larger states there is normally traffic of some sort although it seems to take forever to encounter it.
Probably around 75 miles, on a highway in Pennsylvania. It was Christmas day.
In the summer of 1982, I finished my training at the Nuclear Power Training Unit in Idaho Falls, and pointed my car toward Los Angeles (with a three-day stop in San Francisco to visit my grandmother). I stopped for a meal and a tank of gas at a truck stop in Utah (and to remove a dead seagull from the grill of my 1972 Plymouth Fury II – don’t ask), then continued straight on through to Reno to get a shift of sleep.
IIRC, this was the route I took. Since most of the journey was night-time driving, I don’t think I’m overstating when I estimate that I probably had a 300-mile stretch without seeing another car.
Although most of the people live in a few big cities, to get between them there are only a few big roads. When you go down the road from Adelaide to Perth, you are going through pretty much nothing for a while, but it’s the main road with millions of people at either end.
Paved in 1976. Was still a bit of an adventure until then.
I’m from central British Columbia and I take a certain pride in the fact that we are surrounded by 100’s of km of forest in every direction and human population is generally the exception to the rule.
I had always sort of smirked at the notion that our friends in the lower 48 really had any “wide open spaces” remaining. I’d see a story on the news and I’d say, “How in the hell do you die taking a wrong turn off a highway in America?”. I thought this way until we drove from BC to Las Vegas and decided to take “the back way”.
By the time we got to Burns, Oregon it was night and we just kept on going by way of Frenchglen and what I learned later to be the Catlow Valley Road (Wow!). Being the driver, I was the only one awake and I drove on through the night in silence, hour after hour, in solemn, silent communion with the full moon and the rolling, otherworldy desolation of the landscape. Besides a hamlet or two, there were no settlements, no lights. Nothing.
During that night, I saw ONE other vehicle on the road ahead. By the style of the brake lights, I thought it to be the slow, lazy, pickup truck of some old rancher who had more than a passing notion to not bother doing whatever it was he had set out to do at 4am. A few miles later he was gone.
There was a small settlement or two right before I just couldn’t go on and we slept on the side of the highway, under the moon, in the middle of a dry lake bed just west of where 140 hits 95 in Northern Nevada. When I woke up the sun was blazing and I saw a 18-wheeler on the side of the road and I felt we were back in civilization again.
I have driven across the Yukon and hundreds of km into the bush in BC, and my desert drive was just as desolate.
I don’t think the lower 48 doesn’t have any wide open spaces anymore, anymore. What a beautiful and stunning land.
This is oddly similar to my answer. Leaving the North Rim of Grand Canyon at 1:00 a.m., it’s probably about 30 miles to the park boundary. I saw maybe 100 deer, but not another car.