When completed, it will be the longest road tunnel in Romania, being 2.89 kilometres (1.80 mi) long,[1] The Meseș Tunnel is one of the largest structures along the route of the Transylvania Motorway, the other one being the partially built Suplacu de Barcău Viaduct over the accumulation lake located at Suplacu de Barcău, Bihor County.

Originally, the motorway section which presently includes the Meseș Tunnel, was scheduled to be built by the American company Bechtel as part of the Transylvania Motorway (A3) that would connect Brașov to the Hungarian border and further to Central and Western Europe via Târgu Mureș, Cluj-Napoca and Zalău (entirely 415 km), as the contract was awarded in 2004 to the company by the Romanian government, then led by Adrian Năstase, with the deadline in 8 years.

[4] During this phase, the CNAIR/CNADNR applied multiple penalties on the company working on the feasibility study due to the massive delays, in total worth 278.000 lei.

[2] 4 months after the first announcement, the auction for the Poarta Sălajului - Zalău segment (subsection 3B3) of the A3 motorway containing the Meseș tunnel, which also included the Zalău - Nușfalău segment (subsection 3B4), totalling about 41,0 km, was announced in November 2020, with a cost of approximatively 800 million euros or 4 billion lei (excluding VAT).

[5] The NGO Asociația Pro Infrastructură stated in late November 2020 that it found a series of negative aspects in the documentation, from which includes the fact that only 6 drillings were made in the area of the tunnel's portals, among with other problems.