Do You Commute?

Ninety Minute Commute Around the Globe

Michele Starkey, Yahoo! Contributor Network
Nov 21, 2011 "Share your voice on Yahoo! websites. Start Here."

The Astronomy picture of the day is a ninety minute commute around the globe. You can see the photo here. The International Space Station astronauts may have the least congested commute of all.

I began thinking about commutes and the average commuting times. According to WorldMapper,

"In Thailand, with some of the longest commuting times in the world, a total of 37 million hours is spent traveling to work everyday. If this number is doubled the total time commuting each day in Thailand can be calculated. The average working person living in Thailand spends 2 hours everyday traveling to and from work. The shortest journeys to work are in Malawi, taking just 2 minutes." You can view the WorldMapper site here.

There are other statistics that we gather as we commute around the world and some interesting information I located were the following statistics:

There are approximately 57 million deaths occurring every year on the earth. Of those, approximately slightly more than 5 million are due to non-disease related deaths such as war, accidents and murder or suicide.

Nearly 8 million are deaths of children under one year of age and two and a half million are aged 1 -5. There are approx 100,000 deaths of people over the age of 100 years.

You can watch the video of the 57 million deaths worldwide here.

Back to the daily commutes - if you live in LA or NYC, you may think that you have the worst commute in the entire world, but that title goes to the people who live in Beijing, China. You can read the article here. In Beijing, the rush hour just got about an hour longer and dealing with the congestion and those traffic jams has won them the not-so-coveted title of the worst commute in the world.

According to the US Census 2010 data, most Americans spent about 28 minutes commuting each way, every day.