live estimate
people driving right now
48,607,931people
0.592% of humanity
modelled estimate · updated every second · nothing here is actually being counted
driving since you opened this page
0
journeys driven every day
1,399,908,402
journeys starting every second
16,203
by the numbers
distance driven
532,481
km per second
journeys started
16,203
journeys per second
Are you driving right now?
Nobody is counting the world. We can count you, though.
confirmed drivers today0 people
said not right now0 people
See what's happening in your country
We only use your location to work out your country. We don't store your address.
by country — right now
| country | local time | awake | people |
|---|---|---|---|
| China | 08:41 | 85% | 7,073,950 |
| India | 06:11 | 25% | 2,165,301 |
| United States | 19:41 | 90% | 1,820,004 |
| Indonesia | 07:41 | 60% | 1,014,310 |
| Brazil | 21:41 | 74% | 931,764 |
| Mexico | 18:41 | 92% | 718,231 |
| Japan | 09:41 | 93% | 678,825 |
| Philippines | 08:41 | 85% | 587,341 |
| Vietnam | 07:41 | 60% | 360,675 |
| Colombia | 19:41 | 90% | 284,492 |
How this works (the honest bit).
There are roughly 1.4 billion motor vehicles in use worldwide, and we assume each one moves for about fifty minutes on an average day, which is a global average over private cars, taxis, buses and freight rather than a typical commuter. That puts about 50 million vehicles in motion at any moment, and since almost all of them are driven rather than carried, the figure above is people driving. Driving follows the local clock, so the roads fill and empty with each country's day. We do not attempt to model congestion, only motion. Every figure on this page is a model built from population data, each country's local clock and the assumptions above. It is an estimate, it moves every second, and at least one of them is certainly true.
Why does driving make you tired?
It is not physical work. Driving fatigues you precisely because it is boring and demands attention at the same time.
- Vigilance declines on its own. Watching something unchanging for a sustained period degrades performance within about half an hour, and keeps degrading. You do not have to feel bored for this to happen.
- Monotony accelerates it. Long, featureless roads are worse than busy ones, which is counter-intuitive but well replicated. Low stimulation produces faster and deeper lapses than high workload does.
- The fatigue is invisible from inside. You cannot reliably detect your own lapses. Drivers about to fall asleep often report feeling alert shortly beforehand, which is why I am fine is not evidence.
- Speed compounds the cost. Higher speed leaves less time to react to the same hazard, so a lapse at motorway speed has less margin to correct.
This is why the advice is about stopping rather than concentrating harder. Attention is not a tap you can turn up against a vigilance task; the measures with evidence are sleep, breaks and caffeine, in that order.
Driver fatigue and vigilance-decrement research. The monotony effect and the unreliability of self-reported alertness are both well established.