When it comes to road safety though we can be a little hard on ourselves.

Ireland's fatality rate is coming down, due mainly to our improving road network but spare a thought for drivers in India. Probably the most dangerous place on earth to take to the road where an incredible 75,000 people are killed in road accidents every year.

A bit closer to home, your are twice as likely to be killed on the roads of tiny Lithuania than your are in Ireland but if you really want to live move to Malta, the rate of road deaths there is only one fifth of that in Ireland.

Of course, more often than not you wont be going fast enough to kill yourself during the rush hour but there are delays, and then there are delays. We only have to look up the road to Dublin to see how what should be a 15-minute spin can be turned into a two-hour ordeal by bad planning and few coconuts in the outside lane.

If you are commuting in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo however, it might be an idea to learn a foreign language of quantum physics during your commute. One hundred mile tailbacks (yes 100) are common in Brazil's largest city due mainly to 2,000 new cars joining the melee every week in a city of 20,000,000 formed largely on hills and valleys.

Another nation experiencing a boom in car ownership is Russia. Moscow's many ring roads have become infamous for the scale of their congestion. These ten-lane wide streets regularly com e to a complete stand still and one jam last year took 12 hours to clear so you could theoretically just leave the car in the jam, do a day's work and when you return it would still be there.

So the next time you have to queue for half an hour to get through the Jack Lynch Tunnel, remember it could be worse.

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