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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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
> 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.
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.
This is amazing, seems really detailed and leveraging official sources too, nice job!
Since the author seems to be Catalan, I'll shamelessly plug a Metro-station-relevant event that is ongoing right now in Barcelona:
There are many "ghost" metro stations in Barcelona that been popular (at least used to) urban exploring destinations. Two of those, Gaudí and Correus, are now opening to the public via tours, if you register at https://obrimelmetro.cat
I've only visited Gaudí in a unofficial capacity like a decade ago, and haven't yet done the new tours myself so can't vouch how interesting they are, but seems there are only 5000 open spots in total. It seems like one of the tours is even during the night, so you get as close to the urban exploring experience as possible without having to run across active train tracks :)
The ones in Zürich are not actually metro stations. They where built to be, but then the city voted against a metro. The stations that were already built were converted into tram stations. There where some complications like that fact the the tram is almost too tall to fit. The pantograph is almost fully compressed when the tram enters the tunnel.
The trams also switch to the left side as the doors are only one side.
Zurich does pretty well with light rail, trams and buses. Public transport is very good there. Two more reasons are that the city isn't that big, so you're in easy walking distance of some sort of connection, and the terrain isn't ideal. A good chunk of the population live up steep hills which are well-served by the tram system. The airport is also very well-connected by bus/tram/rail, and only 10-15 minutes to the centre.
That said, I would have loved to see HBf on this website.
Costs, existing infrastructure and alternatives (S-Bahn was extended) and fears that the local businesses above would loose foot traffic if people are no longer traveling above ground with the trams.
From what I read it was in the 70s in a phase of anti globalisation and growth. Of course in those days car traffic was much lower than now. I bet Zürich residents would be really happy to have had one now. Where I live we have both metro and tram and the metro is so much more efficient due to longer trains, more frequent departures, never being held up by traffic etc.
I really like urban places with public transport on the street. It leads to less cars and more pedestrian friendly streets.
Also I think for small distances (Zürich is not that big), I rather ride a bit longer with the tram than going down to a deep metro station, especially in hilly places.
Because talk radio stations of your city are funded by ads for local car dealers and the show hosts constantly dump on public transportation projects. For example, Quebec City.
Buses also have the doors only on one side usually, if you're just running trams on the surface in traffic you'll probably only need them on the pavement side of the vehicle. It's just got weird in this case the assumption the choice was made on changed after they already had a fleet.
A set of crossovers has a high upfront cost, but compare to the added seating capacity on every tram car every day for decades and it doesn't seem so bad.
You might think you could just have trams with doors on both sides, but the geometry isn't expandable, so you're really just trading capacity. The station needs to be built anyway, so the costs of building the tracks differently isn't that high.
Same in Gothenburg. There's a single underground station, with the platform in the middle, so the trams need to cross over. Another underground station is planned, but it will have the tracks in the middle instead.
This guy has spent the last 10 years drawing about 2,547 stations around the world and making 3D models available to everyone. This might be the most amazing thing I have ever seen on the internet. Kudos.
One minor nitpick: zooming the map is very slow (maybe Leaflet is not the best choice?). And the main station in Paris is missing: Châtelet-Les Halles.
Leaflet should easily handle stuff like this if configured correctly. OP just slaps 3000 markers in a single layer, and each of them is an image element in dom. Should probably use some marker clustering for that.
Very impressive work.
Was very saddened to see how Ukrainian Kyiv and Kharkiv stations were excluded. We have deep stations (like Arsenal'na at 105m that connects directly to the above-ground Dnipro station on a river bank), we have both Soviet-made and new stations. Also now they are doubly essential being used for both transportation and shelter during air raids by millions.
Reading comments like yours makes me wonder what kind of mental model of the world some people are working with. Russia does not need HN comments to tell them where train stations are.
This is why agencies don’t published detailed plans (only schematics) of train stations and airports. I learned this when working on a project for the New York subway in the early 2000s.
I also learned something, which I'd always wondered cynically but never thought to investigate. The walking connection between lines at some stations in Barcelona seems so long as to not make sense, but it's explained here that at the time the different lines and stations were dug and extended independently by different companies.
> Among the reasons for having such long corridors [in Barcelona] is the lack of planning or the vision of the metro network as a bunch of individual lines. As an example: line 1 and line 4 were extended to Urquinaona in 1932, but both lines were not connected until 1972, as they were originally operated by different companies.
In London that’s also mostly true due to the patchwork history of different companies building different lines… however when King’s Cross/St Pancras was redeveloped a few years ago the “official” interchange route between Piccadilly and Victoria lines became much, much longer - minutes of walking compared to seconds. This site doesn’t cover that station, but does link to TfL’s own diagrams via IanVisits, and the reason is clear: at one end the platforms of both lines are almost touching - and I believe that shortcut staircase is still there if you ignore the signs and know where to find it - but the tourist friendly route is much more circuitous, going up to the mainline station and back again. I assume it helps to relieve congestion in an extremely busy station, I remember more than one occasion when they just have to close entry to the platforms during rush hour due to overcrowding.
Are there at least multiple entrances? Dublin's main station, Connolly, is actually the amalgamation of two stations, one terminal station and one through station, which were originally owned by different companies before the rail system was nationalised. The only entrances are through the terminal station, so to get to the through lines, you need to walk for about 10 minutes through the terminal station (making them mostly pointless; it's usually quicker just to get on/off at the next station, which has a proper entrance).
They are, apparently, _finally_ going to open a new entrance directly to the through lines, but they've been talking about it for years and I'll believe it when I see it.
It's a bit crazy though that the stations aren't connected. If you want to go from Galway to Belfast you have to go across the city from Heuston station to Connolly. Very annoying with baggage even though these days there's the Luas. And there is actually a rail connection between the two stations (going up to the north from just before Heuston). They could have a quick service between the two. A bit like the dart in the east.
Dublin would be so much better off with a real metro. The bus service is terrible, the Luas only has two lines and focuses a lot on the suburbs.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1]: http://estacions.albertguillaumes.cat/img/brusselles/porte_d...
Saint-Lazare being the most complex one that I saw personally (got lost, I mean)
This is impressive! What tools did they use to make that 3D map?
- 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)
In reality there are probably 10+ entrances.
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.
Since the author seems to be Catalan, I'll shamelessly plug a Metro-station-relevant event that is ongoing right now in Barcelona:
There are many "ghost" metro stations in Barcelona that been popular (at least used to) urban exploring destinations. Two of those, Gaudí and Correus, are now opening to the public via tours, if you register at https://obrimelmetro.cat
I've only visited Gaudí in a unofficial capacity like a decade ago, and haven't yet done the new tours myself so can't vouch how interesting they are, but seems there are only 5000 open spots in total. It seems like one of the tours is even during the night, so you get as close to the urban exploring experience as possible without having to run across active train tracks :)
The ones in Zürich are not actually metro stations. They where built to be, but then the city voted against a metro. The stations that were already built were converted into tram stations. There where some complications like that fact the the tram is almost too tall to fit. The pantograph is almost fully compressed when the tram enters the tunnel.
The trams also switch to the left side as the doors are only one side.
[1] https://cdn.dreso.com/fileadmin/_processed_/0/3/csm_Tierspit...
[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramtunnel_Milchbuck%E2%80%93S... [DE]
EDIT: spelling
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph_(transport)
That said, I would have loved to see HBf on this website.
... Wait, what? That seems like a serious false economy...
One minor nitpick: zooming the map is very slow (maybe Leaflet is not the best choice?). And the main station in Paris is missing: Châtelet-Les Halles.
Other than that, incredible work!! Amazing.
Also, Châtelet les Halles is available just after 'Château d'eau".
I also learned something, which I'd always wondered cynically but never thought to investigate. The walking connection between lines at some stations in Barcelona seems so long as to not make sense, but it's explained here that at the time the different lines and stations were dug and extended independently by different companies.
> Among the reasons for having such long corridors [in Barcelona] is the lack of planning or the vision of the metro network as a bunch of individual lines. As an example: line 1 and line 4 were extended to Urquinaona in 1932, but both lines were not connected until 1972, as they were originally operated by different companies.
They are, apparently, _finally_ going to open a new entrance directly to the through lines, but they've been talking about it for years and I'll believe it when I see it.
Dublin would be so much better off with a real metro. The bus service is terrible, the Luas only has two lines and focuses a lot on the suburbs.
[1]: https://zaubar.com/app?url=zaubar.dev/hochbahn?scene=010