The issue with this entire line of discussion is that growth in the number of p2p routes alone isn't what we should be looking at, but the market share of those

The issue with this entire line of discussion is that growth in the number of p2p routes alone isn't what we should be looking at, but the market share of those routes compared to total numbers of passengers. When you look at the entire picture, you quickly see that the hub-2-hub trunk routes have also grown rapidly. And when you look deeper, you can see that many trunk routes are more or less maxed out on flights. That's because many major airports can't handle more starts/landings or they don't grand more starting/landing slots to airlines to schedule new flights. The only way to grow these routes is through going to bigger planes. tl;dr: There are more flights happening all over the place, but p2p routes' passenger numbers aren't outgrowing h2h routes' numbers.