A friend at school said that they heard that the travel from Sydney to Melbourne (and/or Melbourne to Sydney) is the most travelled ruote (sorry, i cant think of a better word) in the world.
Now with Australis 20 Million people… this CANT be possible… can it?
Perhaps someone has a little fact like “Over 30 Million people travel from City x to City y each year”??
I just need something to say that he is wrong.
Most traveled route in Oz - that I can believe. Is this by air, road, rail? What about New York to New Jersey? I just punched “world’s busiest route” into Google and got Tokyo-Hokaido (by air) and something called the 401 Freeway in Toronto (road, presumably).
And then I hit “submit reply” by mistake. And then I got something about the English Channel (world’s busiest sea lane). Etc, etc.
I would ask your friend to furnish the proof.
Are we talking airline traffic, or all traffic?
So far as passenger air traffic goes, I have heard (but I have no cite) that the busiest routes are, in order,
Tokyo-Sapporo
London-Paris
Sydney-Melbourne
London-Dublin
This site http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/business/story_air180800.shtml gives volume on the Sydney-Melbourne route as “over five million” passengers per year.
No data. But I’d be surprised if New York City to Washington, DC wasn’t on there.
There’s a godawful number of air and rail shuttles every single day and tremendous traffic on I-95.
I remember SYD - MEL being the world’s busiest air corridor was one of those citeless factoids floating around my brain since high school. Just a couple of weeks ago I saw some figures somewhere (I forgot where) which put it in third place, which backs up what UDS said.
Australia does have a small popupation (a little more than Texas), but that population is disproportionately loaded into two large cities 600 miles from each other. They are six hundred tough miles behind the wheel, the trains are slow and expensive, and the buses slow and uncomfortable. Also, Sydney is a bigger market than Melboune, yet Melbourne is HQ to a lot of Australia’s leading companies, so there are lots of business commuters. This all leads to high numbers of air passengers. Also, quite a few international flights do the Sydney - Melbourne (or vice versa) leg as well (BA and Qantas flights to London typically do this).
Highway 401 in Toronto is frequently reported [locally] as North America’s busiest highway, but I don’t remember hearing it being the busiest in the world.
How many flights are there a day between Sydney and Melborne? Air Canada alone has 10 flights a day (Airbus A319’s and A320’s) to La Guardia airport in New York from Toronto, and I’m sure there are American cities that are better served even than that.
New-York-to-London has got to be up there in the list of “busiest routes”…
From Virgin Blue
A timetable search of the Qantas site for Monday 6 November revealed forty flights SYD - MEL. I didn’t check the number of return flights, but assume it is similar. They are leaving Sydney every fifteen minutes during peak times.
So that gives us 58 flights a day for the two domestic carriers - I think they both operate 737s (some Qantas flights may be 747s on part of international routes). There are also some foreign carriers such as Cathay Pacific operating 747s on this route.
Hourly shuttles are operated between NY-Boston, NY-DC, and SF-LA. At least they were a short while ago, don’t know if the dotcom bust has affected some of those schedules.