Back in 1964, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey formed the Regional Cooperation for Development (RCD). The goal was pretty straightforward: make it easier for these three countries to trade with each other. At the time, if a business in Pakistan wanted to ship goods overland to Turkey or onward to Europe, the logistics were a nightmare. The roads were disconnected, unpaved, or simply non-existent.
The leaders of these countries decided they needed a direct, paved route. The plan was to build a continuous highway where a truck could load up at the port in Karachi, Pakistan, drive west through Iran, and eventually hit Istanbul, Turkey. It made sense on paper.
To make it happen, Iran actually helped foot the bill for Pakistan’s stretch of the road, knowing that a highway is entirely useless if it just stops at the border. The Pakistani section of this route became the RCD Highway, officially designated today as the N-25.
Geography and the Route
Building the N-25 was a massive headache for engineers. Balochistan isn't just Pakistan’s largest province; it is also its most geographically unforgiving. The route spans 813 kilometers (about 505 miles) and forces drivers to deal with wildly different climates and terrains in a single trip.
If you drive the highway from south to north, here is what you are dealing with:
From Karachi you travel towards Hub. Eventually you find yourself crossing the Hub River to enter Balochistan.
Between Lasbela and Khuzdar, the road opens up into dry, dusty plains that bake in the summer heat, eventually giving way to harsh, rocky mountains.
The historic 2022 monsoon season physically washed away large chunks of the N-25, completely freezing supply chains
As you keep driving north, the elevation climbs. Kalat is high up, and the winters here bring heavy snow and freezing temperatures, which tears up the asphalt.
You hit Quetta, the provincial capital and a major agricultural hub, before the road splits. One way goes to Chaman on the Afghan border; the other (via the N-40) goes west through miles of empty desert to Taftan on the Iranian border.
It is a grueling drive, but it is the only reliable way to get through this part of the world.
Indispensable highway
The RCD alliance itself fell apart in 1979 after the Iranian Revolution, but the road stayed. Today, it is the absolute backbone of Balochistan’s economy.
Without the N-25, domestic trade in this region would effectively stop. Farmers in Quetta rely on it to send their apples and cherries to markets in the south. Mining companies use it to haul coal and minerals. Everything imported into Karachi that needs to get to western Pakistan travels up this road.
It is also a massive international corridor, just not entirely in the way the 1960s planners imagined. Instead of just pushing goods to Turkey, the highway’s biggest international customer is Afghanistan. Because Afghanistan is landlocked, it relies on Pakistani ports for imports. A huge percentage of that Afghan transit trade is loaded onto trucks in Karachi and hauled all the way up the N-25 to the Chaman border crossing. Recently, new road links have also connected the N-25 to the deep-water port of Gwadar, making it even more crucial for moving freight.
Here is where the reality of the road gets grim.
When the road was built over fifty years ago, it was designed as a single-lane carriageway—meaning just one lane going north, and one lane going south, with no physical divider in the middle. Back then, traffic was light, and trucks were smaller.
Today, the highway is completely overwhelmed. You have thousands of massive 18-wheelers, heavy oil tankers, and fast-moving passenger buses all cramming onto this narrow strip of asphalt.
Overtaking is the primary cause of death on the N-25. If a passenger car gets stuck behind a massive freight truck crawling up a mountain pass at 20 mph, the driver eventually has to swing out into the lane of oncoming traffic to pass.
Because the road is curvy and heavily degraded, visibility is terrible. The result is a relentless string of head-on collisions.
The numbers are genuinely awful. Data from recent years shows that between 6,000 and 8,000 people have died in traffic accidents on this specific stretch of road, with over 4,000 of those deaths happening just between 2012 and 2022. It is a well-known, depressing fact in Balochistan that a person is statistically much more likely to be killed driving on the N-25 than in a terrorism-related incident.
The anger over this has been brewing for years. Locals got so fed up with burying their family members that civil society groups literally organized long marches, walking hundreds of kilometers on foot to demand the government widen the road.
Floods and Checkpoints
As if the traffic wasn't enough, the highway constantly battles nature and regional security issues.
Climate change has hit Balochistan hard. The province flips between severe droughts and sudden, violent flash floods. During the historic 2022 monsoon season, floods physically washed away large chunks of the N-25. The most damaging blow was the collapse of the Hub River Bridge, which effectively cut off Karachi from Balochistan. Supply chains completely froze. It took until early 2025 to finally rebuild and reopen the bridge, which was a wake-up call for the government about how fragile this route is.
Then there’s the security aspect. Balochistan has dealt with a low-level insurgency for decades. Armed groups, like the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), occasionally target state infrastructure, and the N-25 is a very obvious target. Militants sometimes set up roadblocks, halting commercial traffic. Because of this, driving the highway means passing through numerous military and police checkpoints. If you are a foreigner traveling toward the Iranian border, you don’t go alone; the local paramilitary force, the Balochistan Levies, provides mandatory armed escorts.
For a long time, the government’s response to the deaths on the N-25 was just to say there wasn't enough money in the budget to fix an 800-kilometer road. But the sheer volume of casualties and the economic bottleneck eventually forced their hand.
In 2025, things actually started to change. The federal government announced they were taking money saved from international oil price relief—about Rs. 300 billion—and dumping it directly into Balochistan's infrastructure. The absolute top priority was the N-25.
By late 2025, the National Highway Authority (NHA) officially started the massive project of dualizing the road. Dualization means they are finally building a separated set of lanes for opposing traffic. Once completed, cars will be able to pass slow-moving trucks without driving into oncoming traffic, which should immediately drop the fatality rate. While construction is ongoing now in 2026, the authorities have had to put temporary rules in place, like banning heavy traffic at night on the most dangerous mountain passes to keep people alive while the new lanes are paved.