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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

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]
  - kevin_p 1y ago
    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.html https://xinwen.bjd.com.cn/content/s684153bfe4b0380e186d0b6e....
    - dmoy 1y ago
      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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

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]
- kevin_p 1y ago
  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.html https://xinwen.bjd.com.cn/content/s684153bfe4b0380e186d0b6e....
  - dmoy 1y ago
    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.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]