30 Photos That Will Make You Grateful For Your Commute

• DRAKE BAER
 

The average American spends 38 hours a year stuck in traffic. 

It gets worse in the world's megacities: Commuters in Mexico City, Moscow, and Beijing can get stuck in traffic for hours at time. 

Natural and human events can make difficult commutes even worse, be it crippling strikes, military coups, extreme storms, or just a ridiculous number of people trying to load onto a train car. 

Read on to see incredible photos from around the world that will make you grateful for your own commute.

Alex Davies contributed to this article.

Thousands of people commute to work in Bangladesh by boat. Here, residents of Dhaka take out their umbrellas.

AP Photo/ Saurabh Das

Others take the train.

REUTERS/Andrew Biraj

Some seem to enjoy the ride.

REUTERS/Andrew Biraj

The security checks during rush hour in Beijing make for insanely long lines. The checks have been tightened due to an attack in China's Xinjiang region, where dozens were killed on May 22.

Jason Lee/Reuters

Beijing is also in the middle of a pollution crisis, forcing commuters to wade through smog on the way to work.

REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon

Being a pedestrian in Tokyo means having a lot of company.

REUTERS/Toru Hanai

Heavy rains have flooded the Indian city of Guwahati. Yet people still have to schlepp to work.

REUTERS/Utpal Baruah

It's hard to imagine being stuck in this Mumbai commuter train.

REUTERS/Arko Datta

Getting to work got harder in Bangkok this Spring, given that the Thai army declared martial law and stationed soldiers in main intersections.

REUTERS/Damir Sagolj

Getting to work in the Ukraine was a martial situation earlier this year. Notice the tanks ready to be shipped out by rail.

REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis

Getting on the train in Colombo, Sri Lanka's largest city, requires some patience.

REUTERS/Dinuka Liyanawatte

There are more than 37 million motorbikes in Vietnam, so rush hour in Ho Chi Minh City is a blur.

Flickr/Jonas Hansel

At 21 million people, Lagos has become Africa's largest city. It was only 1.4 million in 1970, so as you might imagine, traffic is tough.

REUTERS/Akintunde Akinleye

Train travel got less pleasant in Kenya during a January 2010 strike by minibus drivers.

REUTERS/Thomas Mukoya

The congestion in Cairo, Egypt, gets so deadlocked that you can't tell where the traffic ends and the market begins.

REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh

A May bus driver strike in Sao Paulo, Brazil, made the morning commute even more congested than usual — here are the human-laden escalators in one subway station.

REUTERS/Chico Ferreira

Sao Paulo is home to some of the world's biggest traffic jams, and its subway stations are a bit overcrowded.

REUTERS/Nacho Doce

Just getting the door of a train closed can prove tricky.

REUTERS/Nacho Doce

The city's buses aren't much better.

REUTERS/Paulo Whitaker

In Jakarta, Indonesia, the front of the train is fair game, too.

REUTERS/Beawiharta Beawiharta

Riding with this many people on a motorcycle doesn't look like much fun.

REUTERS/Parivartan Sharma

But it pales in comparison to what trains look like in Indonesia's West Java province, where just 300 cars serve 500,000 commuters each day.

REUTERS/Crack Palinggi

Heavy rain didn't deter these men in Karachi, Pakistan, from riding on the outside of a bus.

REUTERS/Athar Hussain

Commuters were stranded after a 2009 typhoon washed out a chunk of a Philippines highway north of Manila.

REUTERS/Stringer Philippines

At peak times, New York City's Grand Central Terminal gets pretty crazy.

REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

After Hurricane Sandy hit New York, getting into the Holland Tunnel got more difficult.

REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

The trip to work for Google employees was interrupted by protestors on April Fools Day, who claimed that an influx of tech workers were driving up San Francisco housing prices.

REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

A winter snowstorm brought afternoon traffic to a standstill in Calgary.

REUTERS/Todd Korol

A nationwide strike by French transport workers in 2007 made getting into a Paris subway train a lot trickier.

REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes

Commuter trains into and out of the city weren't any more pleasant.

REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/photos-worlds-most-incredible-commutes-2014-6?op=1#ixzz33mXHihBq