Gentlemen, Start Your Waze: These Are the Countries Where Traffic Jams Are a Nightmare

In fact, the last time we got to see streets devoid of traffic was last year when the health crisis hit us totally out of the blue, and it goes without saying nobody liked that picture anyway.

So while every driver out there is just dreaming of a city that hasn’t yet surrendered to cars, traffic jams have become a frustrating part of our lives. And unfortunately, it’s hard (if not impossible) to envision a future without congested roads, despite the entire push for alternative means of transportation and all the other ideas that are progressing so slowly.

In the meantime, we just spend more and more hours sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, with recent research conducted by Select Car Leasing revealing that Britons waste three full days waiting for the green light every single year.

The most congested countries in the world

The analysis conducted this year took into account several factors, such as the number of vehicles registered in every country, the total miles of public roads, as well as the average amount of time spent in traffic each year.

The statistics are depressing, to say the least.

First and foremost, the leading position goes to the United Arab Emirates. While this may sound surprising for some, it’s because nearly 3.4 million vehicles are trying to fit on 4,000 miles (6,430 km) of road, which gets us to 850 vehicles per mile. That’s pretty crowded, right?

Taiwan is the runner-up in this sad chart with 21.9 million vehicles on 43,000 miles (69,200 km) of road. In other words, you should count on average 509 cars per mile if you ever visit the country.

Turkey is third with similar statistics, while Hong Kong is fourth, followed by South Korea, Singapore, and Mexico.

The country where you could literally drive

Select Car Leasing says the top 50 has some pretty surprising regions where you really shouldn’t expect to come across a traffic jam.

Bangladesh apparently has just 1 vehicle per mile based on the analysis detailed above, just ahead of Iran, Sweden, Vietnam, and South Africa. The country has 378,000 registered vehicles and over 369,000 miles (close to 594,000 km) of road.

If you’re looking for the United States in the charts, it’s not included in the summary, but it’s doing great, nonetheless. The analysis reveals that only two countries have more cars than the United States, namely India and China, but given how many roads drivers have in the country, the congestion rate is just 6 vehicles per mile.

“By translating vehicles per mile into time, UK drivers are each spending 4,653 hours of their lives in traffic – that’s almost three days every year. However, that pales in comparison to UAE drivers who spend almost 17 total days a year stationary behind the wheel. It’d take less time to travel the world’s longest driveable distance, from Khasan, Russia to South Africa’s Cape Town (13,600 miles and 13.42 days),” the study reads.

All these statistics perfectly show why applications like Waze have become such a must-have tool for the modern driver. The Google-owned application uses a crowdsourcing engine to provide users with faster routes to destinations, therefore being able to avoid traffic jams and other incidents that could slow them down, such as accidents.

Similar capabilities have also been integrated into other competing products, with the majority of navigation apps currently available out there already being able to generate routes based on real-time traffic information, therefore helping drivers reach their destinations faster.