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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

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.

kaladin-jasnah 1y ago
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 1y ago
  I was mistaken, I meant to say South Asia. Central was more like north of India/China...
  - kaladin-jasnah 1y ago
    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.
  - 62 1y ago
    [dead]
decimalenough 1y ago
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 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    > 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_stations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_railway_statio...
    - pchangr 1y ago
      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.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
kortilla 1y ago
Make a 3D model of a Shanghai then and link it. Don’t just complain about other’s work on shinjuku
GuB-42 1y ago
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 1y ago

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 1y ago
I was mistaken, I meant to say South Asia. Central was more like north of India/China...
- kaladin-jasnah 1y ago
  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.
- 62 1y ago
  [dead]

decimalenough 1y ago

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 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  > 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_stations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_railway_statio...
  - pchangr 1y ago
    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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

kortilla 1y ago

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

GuB-42 1y ago

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.