[decimalenough]

Here's a zoomable 3D model of the world's busiest train station, Shinjuku in Tokyo:

https://satoshi7190.github.io/Shinjuku-indoor-threejs-demo/

3.6 million passengers per day. Wikipedia:

The main East Japan Railway Company (JR East) station and the directly adjacent private railways have a total of 35 platforms, an underground arcade, above-ground arcade and numerous hallways with another 17 platforms (52 total) that can be accessed through hallways to five directly connected stations without surfacing outside. The entire above/underground complex has well over 200 exits.

[numpad0]

Throwing in Japan into random topics in trains feel somewhat unfair. Most train fact sheets fail to include most Asian nations except Japan, often missing even Korea and Taiwan.

Commuter trains in many East/Southeast Asian cities like Shanghai has developed to levels comparable to Tokyo. Trains in some Central Asian cities such as Mumbai were also always notorious for congestions. I think those should also be considered more often and at greater depths, Fermi estimated if need be, than we would be just keep dropping random Shinjuku facts left and right.

[decimalenough]

We have stats for India, and they're no match: Kolkata Howrah gets about 1M pax per day, Mumbai CST around 670k. Nothing to sneeze at, but still several million (!) less than Shinjuku.

China has numerous airport-sized stations that handle huge volumes of long-distance passengers, but I'm not aware of any single commuter hub remotely the size of Shinjuku. Partly this is because of the economic system: Chinese trains are all state-run and centralized, while a large part of why Shinjuku is so busy is that it's a hub for numerous private railways as well.

[dmoy]

> I'm not aware of any single commuter hub remotely the size of Shinjuku

There certainly isn't one that does the volume of passengers. Shanghai Hongqiao or Beijing South are probably busiest, and they're 3-4x less passengers than Shinjuku.

> Partly this is because of the economic system: Chinese trains are all state-run and centralized, while a large part of why Shinjuku is so busy is that it's a hub for numerous private railways as well.

I think another part of it is also size of network. China is a freaking huge country. It's got like 10-15x as much high speed rail track compared to Japan. It's a lot more distributed.

[numpad0]

> 3-4x less passengers than Shinjuku

Exactly what I meant by comparable - those are within 10x. The up to date, yet still suspiciously Japan-dominated table on Wikipedia[1] has couple Indian and Chinese stations within top 20s, as I suspected. The must be more complete data in some non-English forms that has not been pulled into the English bubble on the WWW.

I believe I've been to stations like Daimon-Hamamatsucho and I can sort of understand how such random commuter stops in Tokyo could tally up somewhat absurd passenger counts, but there was absolutely no way that rails in Japan is singlehandedly so ahead of everything in the world that not even any cutting edge Chinese cities compare. There should be more of those in the world, at least now and across Asia.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_railway_statio...

[kevin_p]

I spent a while looking into this and it looks like it's mostly legit. Japanese stations really do seem to be bigger. Having said that, there are two big caveats that make the gap smaller.

First, they're double-counting a lot of passengers in Japan. Tokyo subway isn't a single thing, it's a collection of independent companies, so you need to tap out of one station and tap back into another when changing lines. The JP numbers on Wikipedia are the sum of all the separate Shinjuku stations, which would count a lot of transfer passengers twice.

And second, the table is counting Tokyo's metro system but doesn't include Chinese cities' subways. There are no subway-only stations listed even though plenty of them meet the 30 million passengers/year cutoff. But that's not as big an issue as you might think because even the busiest ones are still far smaller than the big Japanese stations - The busiest is Xizhimen with 237,000 passengers per day, which would translate to 87 million per year. Beijing South Station's subway stop gets 211,000/day = 77 Mn/year, so if we added that the rail passengers it would bring the total to 318 million - but most of them would be going to/from the railway station so that's doing the same sort of double counting as I mentioned in the previous point.

Source for Beijing subway passengers: https://xinwen.bjd.com.cn/content/s684153bfe4b0380e186d0b6e....

[numpad0]

My point is that the list should include more of those stations with China, India, as well as various South Asian countries such as Indonesia in mind.

As in, not necessarily artificially dethroning Shinjuku, but as in someone should just take all public per-station boarding/disembarking data(I think even China would not have issues with that so long it's genuinely compiled for scientific research purposes), run it through LLM or something to build a big CSV of all train stations on the world, sort that, and take top hundreds. This type of crowdsourced review work is only done for Japan due to Japan being Japan for better and worse - e.g. having high mental shares, thin and wide basic knowledge of English, having obsessive cultures, etc etc, and I can't believe it's simple reflection of reality, even accounting for such things as the first point in your comment in mind.

[dmoy]

Yea subway is definitely a whole different ball game. I've ridden Beijing subway a lot, but I was not prepared for Shanghai People's Station. Even in the off season that was nuts. Evidently down in Guangzhou there are even busier subway stations, with some exceeding 1.25m per day.

[bobthepanda]

Shinjuku being as concentrated as it is, is mostly a historical accident. Prewar Japan prohibited mainline railway options inside the Yamanote ring, because old steam railways took up a lot of room with yards and were very polluting; and and so you have all the suburban and long distance railways stopping or going around the ring (the notable exception being the Chuo Line which was built before that regulation). And the flattest, largest, and most attractive land development areas were west of the Yamanote ring so most trains ended up at Shibuya, or Shinjuku, or Ikebukuro, which round out the top three stations in Japan. This led to a lot of problems as these stations became more overcrowded with people changing from mainline suburban trains onto local transportation services. The through-running subways of Tokyo were developed largely to fix this, by allowing trains to pass through into the formerly prohibited city center so that people would stay on the same train instead of clogging up the platforms and stairwells and passageways by transferring. As more railways were able to through run, that lessened the need for yards to store trains that were no longer terminating, and they became large parcels of redevelopment that begot even more ridership.

To some degree, future planners learned from this by not overly concentrating passenger flows at a handful of stations; and by the time they were rapidly urbanizing, trains had become electric and there wasn't really any good reason to stop trains from entering central cities anymore. If you look at the Seoul or Beijing or Shanghai networks, they are intentionally a large, overlapping grid with many transfers to reduce the load on any single station.

[pchangr]

I think you forget to take into account how centralized Japan is. Tokyo is not only the biggest city in the world. It’s also extremely centralized in terms of its infrastructure and as much as other Asian cities have developed similarly, they have also developed more recent and with a different urban model. It’s unlikely that the hub system used in Japan will be replicated somewhere else on that scale.

[GuB-42]

I don't know much about Asian train stations except in Japan but the thing is that in addition to being massive in terms of traffic, the stations are also malls.

If you go to Shinjuku station, it is hard to know what is the station and what is the shopping district. The part dedicated to transportation, like the JR platform you see in every picture is just a fraction of it. All large train stations feature some kind of shops, restaurants, etc... just like airports do, however Japan is on another level. There are full department stores in the station, some of them operated by the railroad themselves.

I think there are historical reasons to it, where private railways are also retail companies, and built stations as shopping centers, which looks like a clever idea for a city to develop its public transport infrastructure from private funds.

[kaladin-jasnah]

Is India considered central Asia? I've always seen it referred to as south Asia, and former Soviet countries like Kazakhstan have been referred to as central Asia. I think India is east of these "central Asian" countries. Perhaps this is all a bit of pedantry.

[numpad0]

I was mistaken, I meant to say South Asia. Central was more like north of India/China...

[kaladin-jasnah]

Ah, I see. I was curious since I guess you can refer to it as central Asia since it's west of east Asia, haha.

[kortilla]

Make a 3D model of a Shanghai then and link it. Don’t just complain about other’s work on shinjuku

[bowsamic]

I’m really impressed at how usable that visualisation is on mobile. It’s also really great aesthetically. Japanese artists can still do the best sci fi designs about

[rayiner]

It’s so lovely

[seabass-labrax]

Is this actually to scale? If so, do the near-vertical moving dashed lines depict inclined lifts or escalators? Because they look very steep when you compare them to other metro escalators, such as those in the Brussels Metro's Porte de Hal / Hallepoort station[1], which seem closer to 50° from horizontal.

[1]: http://estacions.albertguillaumes.cat/img/brusselles/porte_d...

[robertlutece]

I believe the floors have been pulled further apart to help with navigating around the model which would also steepen the escalators.

[raverbashing]

Yeah that makes Exit 8 looks like Child's play

Saint-Lazare being the most complex one that I saw personally (got lost, I mean)

[N19PEDL2]

> https://satoshi7190.github.io/Shinjuku-indoor-threejs-demo/

This is impressive! What tools did they use to make that 3D map?

[wkat4242]

It looks like the vertical distances are greatly exaggerated though, making it look bigger than it is. Nice work still

[giveita]

3.6m is crazy. That must be a decent % of the entire Tokyo pop.

[kjkjadksj]

Almost 10%. Framed like that it almost seems highly inefficient that so many are routed through this one station in particular. Presumably they could have had more direct routes to their destinations.

[giveita]

And for context Tokyo is a huge metro. It can be 40 minutes between 2 places directly that any other country would consider cities by themselves. There is no such thing as CBD or downtown here IMO. This makes it more odd so many people route through one place.

[tkiolp4]

If only 1% give money to homeless people, that’s… a good place to beg for money. I would probably make more there than what i make at my fancy software engineering job (100K before taxes per year):

- 36000 people

- let’s say each give 10 cents ($)

- that’s $3600 per day

- if you beg 8h per day, that’s $1200/day

- begging mon to fri means $24000 per month (tax free)

[lm28469]

With 28800s in 8 hours that's more than 1 donation per second during these 8 hours. Also you now have 36000 10ct coins, that's more than 100kg in coins to move every day

[apexalpha]

This assumes there is a central entrance you can situate yourself as a beggar.

In reality there are probably 10+ entrances.

[Thorrez]

> The entire above/underground complex has well over 200 exits.

[wkat4242]

> begging mon to fri means $24000 per month (tax free)

Keep in mind that you'd have $24k in low value coins at that point :) You'll need a warehouse like Scrooge McDuck and a wheelbarrow if you wanna go shopping.

Of course you can change it into paper money or even a bank balance but you'll quickly reach the point where that can no longer be legally done tax free.

Even the income in one day would be 36000 coins in your scenario. Not sure how much that would be in Yens but 36000 US dimes would weigh 225kg or about 500 lbs :)

Ps I wonder if begging is even a thing there. They seem super strict on social etiquette and unwritten rules and I doubt being a vagrant with a cardboard sign asking for money would pass the mould.

It's also a big reason why I've never been there, I don't fare well in strict societies and communities. Formal stuff makes me anxious.

Edit: ah I see the rest of the thread answered my question (begging is illegal) and also raised the same point about the coins sorry.

[initramfs]

very unrealistic because many train riders don't carry coins, nor will use a contactless payment to pay a random begger, even if they see them on the platform every day.

[Mona4000]

Begging is illegal in Japan.

[kjkjadksj]

It is illegal in all kinds of places. The question is not the letter of the law but if police enforce the law.

[wkat4242]

This is Japan, not Spain. I'd imagine the law is enforced pretty strictly like all their social rules are too.

[pezezin]

You'd imagine, but do you know for sure? As an Spanish guy living in Japan, I can tell you that I see plenty of laws consistently broken here in ways that would never fly in Spain. For example, the way the average Japanese drives, or the need for women-only train cars.

Please stop thinking that Japan is some superior society where everything is perfect.

[wkat4242]

Oh no I don't think it's perfect at all. It would be a horror for me with all the formalities. It would be like a minefield for me. I can only be myself.

But I didn't realise women were in danger on trains. That doesn't happen here, no. Well, it does incidentally but not to the point that women-only cars are warranted, luckily. But Spain is still a pretty patriarchal society.

[smcl]

This is hilarious, thank you

[MarcelOlsz]

Leave it to HN to gamify begging.