At one minute past midnight on 31 March 2023, Gibraltar stopped driving cars across its runway. Almost every article written since says the famous road crossing is gone. It is not. Pedestrians, cyclists and mobility scooter users still cross an active international runway on foot, and in 2026 they still do it every day. That is the thing worth knowing before you arrive. The tunnel changed the problem for drivers. It did not abolish the crossing, and if you walk in from Spain you are still going to stand at a barrier and wait for an aeroplane. The airfield started in 1936 as an emergency strip for the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm. The runway was built across Winston Churchill Avenue in 1941, and then extended in 1942 and 1943 by reclaiming land from the Bay of Gibraltar with rock blasted out of the Rock itself during wartime tunnelling. By July 1943 it was 1,800 yards, about 1,600 metres, long enough for the aircraft the war required. Today [runway 09/27](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibraltar_International_Airport) is 1,776 metres of grooved asphalt, and it lies across the only flat ground Gibraltar has. There was never an alternative. The isthmus is narrow, the Rock is 426 metres of limestone immediately south of it, and the single road to Spain and the single runway had to share the same strip of sand. Winston Churchill Avenue itself is only 1.5 km long. Once you are through customs it becomes the CA-34 on the Spanish side. That is the whole geography of the problem in two sentences. The mechanism is a level crossing, not a traffic light. [Movable barricades](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill_Avenue,_Gibraltar) swing shut across the road whenever an aircraft is landing or taking off, exactly as they would for a train. Before the tunnel, the commonly cited figure was more than fifteen closures a day. Since 31 March 2023 the runway is closed to everyday road traffic. It remains available for exceptional, specific or emergency use, and it is still open to pedestrians, cyclists, scooter riders and mobility scooter users, under the same security and safety procedure that used to apply to cars. A pedestrian subway is provided as an alternative for anyone who would rather not wait. > The tunnel took the traffic jam away. It did not take the aeroplane away. The runway and aerodrome are not the airport's. They belong to the Ministry of Defence and are operated by the Royal Air Force as [RAF Gibraltar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Gibraltar), administered by British Forces Gibraltar, with the civil terminal and apron on the north side of the strip and the RAF apron and hangar on the south. That is why crossing on foot involves a security procedure rather than a pelican button. You are walking across a military aerodrome that happens to handle ten civil movements a day, and the people who decide when the barriers move are not running a road. The replacement is a dual carriageway called the Kingsway. It runs roughly 1.2 km from a new roundabout on Devil's Tower Road to the East Gate roundabout, including about 350 metres of covered tunnel under the eastern end of the runway, and it cost 34 million pounds. The Government of Gibraltar [announced the opening date](https://www.gibraltar.gov.gi/press-releases/airport-tunnel-to-open-on-31st-march-2023-1772023-8730) in 2023 and [inaugurated it](https://www.gibraltar.gov.gi/press-releases/kingsway-inaugurated-1872023-8737) that spring, fourteen years after the scheme was first announced in 2009. It is now the only regular access route for cars, motorcycles and commercial vehicles between the frontier and Gibraltar, and the way you reach the airport terminal, the Eroski supermarket, Western Beach and Four Corners by road. | Who you are | Before 31 March 2023 | Now | | Driving a car or van | across the runway | through the Kingsway tunnel | | On a motorcycle | across the runway | through the Kingsway tunnel | | On foot | across the runway | still across the runway, or the subway | | On a bicycle or scooter | across the runway | still across the runway | | On a mobility scooter | across the runway | still across the runway | | Emergency vehicles | across the runway | runway still available when needed | Gibraltar handled 424,386 passengers on 3,628 flights in 2024. That is roughly ten aircraft movements a day. The terminal opened in phases, arrivals on 26 November 2011 and departures on 26 September 2012, covers 35,000 square metres and was built for 1.5 million passengers a year, so it runs at under a third of what it was designed for. The civil airport itself opened in 1959, more than twenty years after the strip was first laid, and the terminal has always sat on the north side, the frontier side. That is the small detail that makes the walk work: you come out of arrivals already at the top of the isthmus, with the crossing and the Spanish border both a few minutes away and the town on the other side of the runway. Scheduled routes are all to the United King