The world's busiest train route, and one of the busiest air routes, is between Tokyo and Osaka, Japan's two biggest metropolitan areas. On that corridor, the shin-kansen, as Japan's bullet trains are known, were born in 1964. They whizz 120,000 passengers a day smoothly from one place to another, on trains that leave every ten minutes. Although humans, not robots, are at the controls, the average delay is a miraculous 36 seconds. To take all those passengers by air would require 667 aircraft, each with 180 seats, or five times Japan's fleet of Boeing 737s, estimates Macquarie, an investment bank.
展开▼
