Who doesn’t want to be next to an empty seat on a flight? If that’s your goal, the following might be trips to avoid.

The departures/arrivals board below lists the most important routes in the world economy in terms of total number of passengers flying them.

Representative of a shift in world power, the busiest connection, with just over 2.1 million passengers every year (or almost 6,000 every day) is the Hong Kong-Taipei trek. Numbers two and three – LA to New York and London to New York – might not be a surprise, or avoidable, but environmentalists will express chagrin at others on the list. Many could either be undertaken by train or, in some cases, driven in a couple of hours.

Source: Globalization and World Cities Research Network. www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/rb/rb152.html