By Chung Ah-young
The number of tickets sold to passengers to travel on the nation’s high-speed train is expected to hit the 500 million mark on Sept. 24, 11 years since the Korea Train Express (KTX) debuted in 2004.
The Korea Railroad Corp. (KORAIL) said Sunday that the trains are estimated to have run a total of 280 million kilometers so far.
According to the company, the number of daily passengers has reached 170,000 on average, a two-fold increase from 72,000 passengers in 2004.
The number of yearly passengers has soared from 19.8 million in 2004 to 56.9 million in 2014 and will likely surpass 59.2 million this year.
As part of celebrations events, the company said that it will give first class tickets free to the 500 millionth passenger.
According to a market research report by KORAIL in 2014, the share of KTX services among competing modes of transportation that travel more than 300 kilometers topped the list with 52.9 percent, followed by cars with 17.7 percent, express buses with 14 percent and airplanes with 13.2 percent.