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'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.
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.
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.
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.
When I read this and your other comments, it sounds like its less about the information, but that you have some strange obsession/annoyance with Japan and its culture. I wonder why.
It gives me mild itches when this country feels a bit overrated or way overblown or 7-11's Jiro analogue shrinkflates yet again, since it's kind of where I live. Constantly humiliating national prides of e.g. French people with random JR facts just doesn't sound like a good thing to me.
Interesting. I guess if I spent more time online on social media, maybe I'd feel the same.
I also live in Japan and while there is a lot that I agree is overrated about Japan, especially from the vantage point of those online who don't have actual experience living here, I also choose to stay and live here because there are many facets that I truly do like and are not overrated.
There is a lot thats different, but I've learned to understand that it is just that, different, not necessarily good or bad. Its especially easy to fall into the good or bad type of thinking if I think relative to the standards of the culture of where I'm originally from, understanding that my culture is also what colors my own lens about the world and that it is not as logical as it is imbued from childhood. That type of thinking, because it is relative between cultures, also has a tendency toward perceptions of cultural superiority/inferiority. And that'll tickle a very primitive, tribal, and emotional part of our brains.
If you feel that comments give you mild itches and essentially an emotional reaction, then its probably not healthy for you to constantly search and engage. I personally just avoid things about Japan on English social media because its quite bad. I was curiously browsing this site and stumbled upon some threads about Japan, and it just feels like the same, no matter the more serious crowd on here. The dichotomy of Japan worshippers and Japan naysayers, they are to me, two sides of the same coin. I prefer to engage outside and try and view differences holistically, to try and see the inherent benefits of something that is different.
I guess I just want Japan to be truly a part of this planet and part of the human society, not a virtual dreamworld Timbuktu beyond the Gate only accessible by embarking high-tech Boeing aerospace product. That's what the Japanese government always wanted to since coal-powered US gunships appeared out of nowhere, after all. Squatting top 18/20 of top 10 busiest stations list don't help achieving that goal. I sort of also feel that East Asia is underrated while at it.
I don't mean to artificially undermine this country, nor look down on anyone. I just naively believe, better data drive us forward faster. And the data at hand don't really look down to Earth. So it gives me an itch.
You're right that I shouldn't be addicted to social media. I know, I shouldn't be...
Before I disappear into the ether, I will just say its best to not engage with such diatribe on the internet. I say that for your sanity.
I've observed that discussions of foreign cultures online tend to devolve into ethnocentrism, with exchanges hinting at cultural superiority/inferiority. If I were to hazard a guess, Japan is particularly prone to this on English social media given its rising popularity and how little overlap it has with western cultures. When a culture is fundamentally different, its distinguishing features show through more on the surface, because they are naturally manifestations of the differing underlying values. Again, none of it is about good/bad, correct/wrong, superior/inferior. Just different. Like flavors of icecream.
They say outrage is addicting. These online discussions are particularly addicting in a pernicious way, probably because any feeling of threat to one's own cultural identity (i.e. one's tribe) will stoke the fires on the most basic parts of our human psychology. Engage enough times and start taking sides on cultural judgement/appraisal, and you'll probably end up feeling constantly triggered for no reason from minor instigations online (intentional or ignorant).
Now combine that feeling of outrage with scrollable access. To me, it is no wonder that there are many stories nowadays of ordinary people that become radicalized online.
I remind myself that various cultures exist worldwide that reflect different values. Comparisons and feelings of superiority/inferiority exist separately from that.
So I generally try to avoid hints of such discourse online that tend to confound these things, though I still come across it in random places when I'm not looking for it, and admittedly that urge to join in arises. In real life, I have relationships that come from a place of understanding, that are more complex than online diatribes about cultures. A far more rich set of interactions with individual personalities, both Japanese and non-Japanese. I can only hope that enough AI drivel will lead to critical mass of brainrot online and force us to engage outside more.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
i remember visiting zurich once and standing at a light rail station when the next train was one minute overdue and all the people waiting were looking at their watches in total disbelief and consternation. warms my sla-minded heart :)
Yes, my mistake - it's been a while! Definitely a local thing, and always with German pronunciation. There were a several words/phrases like that which got loaned into English. Doubly confusing because it wasn't always clear if the new word was Züri, regular Swiss-German, French but not Swiss-German, or High German. Had to be careful using new vocab in Germany!
It's between the underground tracks of Bahnhof Löwenstrasse and the above ground: [1]
There are a lot of little neat things. For example the elevators go sideways [2] because the platform in the underground Bahnhof is wider (this is due to safety regulations etc.) [3]
BTW, what is marked as Stadttunnel in [1] is the new bike tunnel [4] which has actually been there for many years as it was supposed to be a highway tunnel but was never opened (built many, many years ago).
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.
I don’t think that’s the causal relationship. Even if the stakeholders were purely the listeners: radios are in cars. Basically all the radio listeners aren’t just drivers they are driving.
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.
Feels like you're limiting your options quite significantly, though. It's not just underground; elevated trams will often have island stops, and even street-level ones do sometimes.
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.
It’s highly likely that Russia already has detailed models of every stations in Ukraine. If they didn’t before the war, they do now. Mapping public infrastructure doesn’t require a lot of spying.
But you have to understand that information control during war requires a shift of mindset. It’s better to start controlling everything which could be used by the enemy even if they probably already have it than try to establish complex rules. It gives good habits to people.
Of course they know where the stations are. But they don’t necessarily know the precise local of all the underground tunnels, exits, mechanical rooms, equipment, etc. The underground network is far more complex than what the consumer map hanging on the wall in the station shows.
During the Cold War, Russia managed to map huge parts of the world, sometimes with higher quality and more accurate measurements than the countries themselves! Especially noteworthy considering that some of those countries (like the UK) were trying their hardest to prevent those sort of maps being made in the first place, yet the Russians ended up with better maps of the UK than UK themselves.
Considering that that happened decades ago, I'm guessing their (and others) capability of doing those sort of things have only improved, not gotten worse. But that's just me guessing.
I'd like to remind you that Russia is not the USSR. Surely the technology has significantly improved since, but some capabilities are definitely lost. One example is them not being able to build more strategic bombers.
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.
As part of DART+ Southwest, they're building a new station, Heuston West, where the disused Heuston Platform 10 (the one with the through lines) is now. It'll. be on the DART line and provide service to, presumably, Grand Canal Dock, via the Phoenix Park Tunnel (some commuter trains from Grand Canal Dock already use the tunnel and pass Heuston, but platform 10 hasn't been in use since before the tunnel was reopened). I'd assume that Houston and Heuston West will be linked. Won't be done til 2029, tho, and if any part of it slips it will be building the new station (Irish Rail is historically bad at that).
Love this project. Back in my transit blogging days, one of the themes was short and long transfers. And here this idea immediately starts surfacing just looking at the stations - the crazy mazes with long tunnels are cool to explore on paper, but suck for actual transfers. It adds slogs in the middle of the trips, and kind of discourages transit use because trips seem longer and more work.
When scrolling down, the author actually includes a long discussion on the best possible transfer layouts! Many of the terrible stations over time are of course historically grown, evolved over time, and weren't the result of some maniac evil genius deciding to create miserable transfers. Systems are built sometimes over a hundred years, so a later station is added mostly where it can fit, not a as a result of some master plan.
But there's also ways to deal with these issues, which can be found in Berlin.
1) for the recently opened "Unter den linden" station, which is a transfer between a new extension (u5) and a 100-year-old line (u6), a station on the old line was actually moved by 180m so that the transfer would be good. (That is, the old station was closed and a new station built a bit a distance away)
2) in general in Berlin, especially after WWII, a lot of the subway construction followed a very long term master plan (to the extend that West Berlin actually planned a network for all of Berlin, even though the East was in another country behind the iron curtain). When stations were built, the planners "knew" it would be a transfer some day, so they added in accomodations ("Bauvorleistung" or preparations ahead of actual construction), often whole station shells for the future line it would connect to. This resulted in a lot of short transfers even when lines were built decades apart. And it also resulted in a bunch of ghost stations, which have yet to be connected to lines.
A very cool project, and a great resource for people with reduced mobility - I semi-regularly use Transport for London's station drawings (linked on this website) over the official accessibility map, which doesn't differentiate between stairs and escalators for example.
"Worst of all, the air was full of fumes; breathing was painful and difficult, and a dizziness came on them, so that they staggered and often fell. And yet their wills did not yield, and they struggled on."
The issue with Châtelet - aside from how crowded it is - is that it’s two stations masquerading as one, same as Montparnasse-Bienvenüe.
Once you know what’s on which side and that the directions in the main hall are purposefully made to have you meander for flow control and you can just cut through, it gets a lot more manageable.
There is an article in ElPais from 2020 about the author, Albert Guillaumes, and his creative process. Very interesting read! (texts are in Spanish though)
And they are almost all drawn “manually”! I am SO impressed by the dedication
> For the last 10 years I have been able to draw around 2,547 stations
> A pen, a notebook, a bit of spatial vision and the willingness to navigate all the staircases, corridors, platforms and mezzanines are enough to draw a station
> Due to the boredom provoked by the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, I decided to digitalize all the sketches I had drawn in since the early 2010s
Pretty impressive! Interesting shoutout to Längenfeldgasse (Vienna) for the cross-platform interchange. This is a pretty popular station to get to Schönbrunn Palace & Zoo, as such the majority of people changing stay on the platform and you really physically see the lean design in motion. This can probably only be done during the design phase otherwise to costly to ever change if it's even possible.
I was never able to build mental model of Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Most of the times was simply following the signs and yup, the layout is complicated.
This is pretty shockingly detailed. I zoomed into my city of Cologne germany thinking there'd be nothing showed here since we don't have a 'real' metro but rather a Stadtbahn system that's partially separate from the street grid and partially on the streets.
Turns out they had excellent descriptions, models and info of all of our stations.
Hauptbahnhof (main station) is incomplete, or possibly overly pedantic; it's missing the "Westseite" station part where tram 9 stops (it doesn't pass through the 4 middle tracks where the other trams make their stops.) It's technically listed as a separate stop on plans, but last I checked it's considered the same stop for transfers (i.e. you don't get "walk from station A to station B" instructions.) It's also almost directly above the subterranean S-Bahn tracks that are shown, so just by location it should be included… (and it's also misspelled Leizpig, which is a little funny.)
For Bayerischer Bahnhof and Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz, the tram stops are completely missing.
This is so neat! I hope at some point in the future cities and/or nation-states provide real time 3d environments of their built environment, with highlights for public transit, public spaces, food, government services, etc. Like if gis systems were better standardized and have these models integrated into them.
Seattle has been a mess of last minute bus stop changes that aren't propagated to Google maps before you find yourself missing your bus. And even checking the metro page directly sometimes isn't up to date with sudden construction closures
If you want to see a ridiculous amount of escalators, take a look at the Collblanc station in Barcelona. It takes 6 escalators to transfer between the L5 and L9S lines.
A while back I was in Berlin, and got lost in Nollendorfplatz station (which is not particularly _big_) for about ten minutes. Now, for various reasons I had been awake for about 36 hours, so mostly blamed it on that, but if this site is correct it confirms my suspicion that that is a weird station. U1 and U3 are on different levels for different directions!
I’d like to add an interesting metric: density of subway/metro stations as measured by number of stations per square kilometer.
In European cities,
City,
Metro System,
Stations,
City Area (km²),
Density (stations/km²):
1. Paris,
Metro de Paris,
244,
105,
2.32
2. Berlin,
U‑Bahn only,
173,
892,
~0.19
3. London
Underground (London Tube),
~270,
1,572,
~0.17
4. Madrid,
Metro de Madrid,
~300,
605,
~0.50
Paris takes the lead, not just in Europe but globally, with ≈2.32 stations/km². Madrid has a dense network too (≈0.50), though well behind Paris. Berlin (U‑Bahn only) and London have much lower densities (~0.17–0.19). Rome’s iconic metro is relatively sparse in terms of station density compared to other major European and Asian cities.
Here’s how European and Asian cities stack:
1. Paris (~2.32 stations/km²)
2. Seoul (~1.27)
3. Madrid (~0.50)
4. Tokyo (~0.46)
5. London (~0.17)
6. Berlin (~0.19)
7. Hong Kong (~0.09)
8. Shanghai (~0.06)
9. Rome (~0.057)
Seoul is highest among major Asian metro systems in terms of station concentration, making it the city in Asia with the densest metro network per square kilometer. Seoul has 768 stations in its metropolitan subway system spread across the city proper area of 605 km². By comparison, Tokyo’s combined metro (Tokyo Metro + Toei) has around 286 stations over ~621 km, giving a density of about 0.46 stations/km². Beijing has 523 stations but the city covers about 16,411 km²—yielding a much lower density (~0.03 stations/km²). Shanghai’s figure fluctuates due to rapid expansions: 409 unique stations from early 2025 data.
In addition to density, another interesting metric is
the number of street-level entrances (exit/entry points). Counting just stations ignores how many access points are available to the public. More entrances = better coverage, shorter walking distances, improved accessibility, especially in dense urban zones. Examples from Paris are:
Saint‑Lazare station (Lines 3, 12, 13, 14) has 11 entrances. Hotel de Ville (Lines 1 & 11) has 7 entrances. Madeleine station (Lines 8, 12, 14) has 5 accesses with 7 separate entrances. Alesia station (Line 4) has 6 entrances. Opera station (Lines 3,7,8) has 3 main entrances.
On average, Paris Metro stations have approximately 3–6 street-level entrances, with major hubs having 7–11. Paris doesn’t just have many stations, it maximizes them with multiple entry points, making its system exceptionally accessible over its territory.
Seoul also scores similar in accessibility due to its exit-rich stations, especially in dense areas. Other major metros (Tokyo, Madrid, London) lag when entry points are factored in.
I did not include US cities but I believe New York City might be notable.
> [...] Madrid has a dense network too (≈0.50), though well behind Paris.
As a native of Madrid, I must point out that using the nominal surface area of the municipality of Madrid (~605 km²) is misleading for these purposes due to the Monte del Pardo [0] and Soto de Viñuelas [1], two fenced off forest areas covering around 180 km² between them. The impact of these areas on the nominal surface area of the city is visually obvious when you compare the outlines of Madrid and Paris administrative areas:
As a result, the relevant surface for estimating the density of Metro stations in Madrid should be at most ~425 km². While one may arguably also want to exclude the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes from the surface area of Paris, even the "de-Pardo'd" surface area of Madrid still contains significant non-urban areas such as the Casa de Campo forest, large non-built-up areas, and even most of its airport.
(In any case though, after this pedantic "well ackshually", I must also point out that a few Madrid Metro stations actually fall outside of its municipal limits. I would get out more, but I live in a town without a Metro)
Is Paris 6 times smaller than Madrid and 15 times smaller than London? Seems suspicious to me. What exactly is the boundary of this "area" and how does it relate to the subway network?
A significant proportion of the administrative area of Madrid is covered by fenced-off forests. Plus it covers other swathes of non-developed land and even most of its airport. The administrative area of Paris proper, on the other hand, is fully urbanised. See here for comparison:
London is a whole different animal. While Madrid and Paris are arguably "similar" cities in terms of urban design and residential density, London and UK cities in general are completely different.
I just had a quick look at a metro station I know, Sèvres Babylone in Paris, and it seems like there's a mistake in the model, adding a corridor that doesn't exist in the actual station.
The page footnote says that all sketches were hand drawn by the author over a 10 year period, and digitized during COVID by the power of extreme boredom.
Perhaps it doesn't work on my browser, but all I see are low fidelity, wireframe/stick 3D model projections rendered as 2D images without much detail that could be made in a few minutes.
As the title suggests it is not a website of models of European metro stations because:
(a) it contains models of North American stations, and
(b) it does not contain stations from the St Petersburg[1] or Moscow metros which are significant European metros (the Moscow metro[2] is the longest in Europe)
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.
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'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.
> 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...
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....
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.
When I read this and your other comments, it sounds like its less about the information, but that you have some strange obsession/annoyance with Japan and its culture. I wonder why.
It gives me mild itches when this country feels a bit overrated or way overblown or 7-11's Jiro analogue shrinkflates yet again, since it's kind of where I live. Constantly humiliating national prides of e.g. French people with random JR facts just doesn't sound like a good thing to me.
Interesting. I guess if I spent more time online on social media, maybe I'd feel the same.
I also live in Japan and while there is a lot that I agree is overrated about Japan, especially from the vantage point of those online who don't have actual experience living here, I also choose to stay and live here because there are many facets that I truly do like and are not overrated.
There is a lot thats different, but I've learned to understand that it is just that, different, not necessarily good or bad. Its especially easy to fall into the good or bad type of thinking if I think relative to the standards of the culture of where I'm originally from, understanding that my culture is also what colors my own lens about the world and that it is not as logical as it is imbued from childhood. That type of thinking, because it is relative between cultures, also has a tendency toward perceptions of cultural superiority/inferiority. And that'll tickle a very primitive, tribal, and emotional part of our brains.
If you feel that comments give you mild itches and essentially an emotional reaction, then its probably not healthy for you to constantly search and engage. I personally just avoid things about Japan on English social media because its quite bad. I was curiously browsing this site and stumbled upon some threads about Japan, and it just feels like the same, no matter the more serious crowd on here. The dichotomy of Japan worshippers and Japan naysayers, they are to me, two sides of the same coin. I prefer to engage outside and try and view differences holistically, to try and see the inherent benefits of something that is different.
I guess I just want Japan to be truly a part of this planet and part of the human society, not a virtual dreamworld Timbuktu beyond the Gate only accessible by embarking high-tech Boeing aerospace product. That's what the Japanese government always wanted to since coal-powered US gunships appeared out of nowhere, after all. Squatting top 18/20 of top 10 busiest stations list don't help achieving that goal. I sort of also feel that East Asia is underrated while at it.
I don't mean to artificially undermine this country, nor look down on anyone. I just naively believe, better data drive us forward faster. And the data at hand don't really look down to Earth. So it gives me an itch.
You're right that I shouldn't be addicted to social media. I know, I shouldn't be...
Before I disappear into the ether, I will just say its best to not engage with such diatribe on the internet. I say that for your sanity.
I've observed that discussions of foreign cultures online tend to devolve into ethnocentrism, with exchanges hinting at cultural superiority/inferiority. If I were to hazard a guess, Japan is particularly prone to this on English social media given its rising popularity and how little overlap it has with western cultures. When a culture is fundamentally different, its distinguishing features show through more on the surface, because they are naturally manifestations of the differing underlying values. Again, none of it is about good/bad, correct/wrong, superior/inferior. Just different. Like flavors of icecream.
They say outrage is addicting. These online discussions are particularly addicting in a pernicious way, probably because any feeling of threat to one's own cultural identity (i.e. one's tribe) will stoke the fires on the most basic parts of our human psychology. Engage enough times and start taking sides on cultural judgement/appraisal, and you'll probably end up feeling constantly triggered for no reason from minor instigations online (intentional or ignorant).
Now combine that feeling of outrage with scrollable access. To me, it is no wonder that there are many stories nowadays of ordinary people that become radicalized online.
I remind myself that various cultures exist worldwide that reflect different values. Comparisons and feelings of superiority/inferiority exist separately from that.
So I generally try to avoid hints of such discourse online that tend to confound these things, though I still come across it in random places when I'm not looking for it, and admittedly that urge to join in arises. In real life, I have relationships that come from a place of understanding, that are more complex than online diatribes about cultures. A far more rich set of interactions with individual personalities, both Japanese and non-Japanese. I can only hope that enough AI drivel will lead to critical mass of brainrot online and force us to engage outside more.
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.
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.
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.
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 was mistaken, I meant to say South Asia. Central was more like north of India/China...
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.
Make a 3D model of a Shanghai then and link it. Don’t just complain about other’s work on shinjuku
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
It’s so lovely
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...
I believe the floors have been pulled further apart to help with navigating around the model which would also steepen the escalators.
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)
> https://satoshi7190.github.io/Shinjuku-indoor-threejs-demo/
This is impressive! What tools did they use to make that 3D map?
It looks like the vertical distances are greatly exaggerated though, making it look bigger than it is. Nice work still
3.6m is crazy. That must be a decent % of the entire Tokyo pop.
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.
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.
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
This assumes there is a central entrance you can situate yourself as a beggar.
In reality there are probably 10+ entrances.
> The entire above/underground complex has well over 200 exits.
> 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.
Begging is illegal in Japan.
It is illegal in all kinds of places. The question is not the letter of the law but if police enforce the law.
This is Japan, not Spain. I'd imagine the law is enforced pretty strictly like all their social rules are too.
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.
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.
This is hilarious, thank you
Leave it to HN to gamify begging.
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 :)
Thanks for sharing. London has these permanently, and while not cheap, they're very much worth it too.
I agree
Wow, very nice project.
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
I think you meant a pantograph instead of a photograph ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph_(transport)
Yes, it got autocorrected. Thanks
I'd love to know why you'd vote against having a metro.
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.
i remember visiting zurich once and standing at a light rail station when the next train was one minute overdue and all the people waiting were looking at their watches in total disbelief and consternation. warms my sla-minded heart :)
One of the most mind blowing things for me was seeing that river Sihl flows through Hbf between the tracks.
To be precise it flows above (and under) the tracks, as in, perpendicular, not "in between" parallel tracks.
BTW Hbf is a München thing, we call our beloved Zürich Hauptbahnhof just HB :-)
Yes, my mistake - it's been a while! Definitely a local thing, and always with German pronunciation. There were a several words/phrases like that which got loaned into English. Doubly confusing because it wasn't always clear if the new word was Züri, regular Swiss-German, French but not Swiss-German, or High German. Had to be careful using new vocab in Germany!
Not to mention that the locals here when referring to it while speaking English, totally translate it to "eɪʧ biː" sometimes.
Other times, in the middle English sentence, the German pronunciation pops up "ˈhaː ˈbeː"
Fun
> BTW Hbf is a München thing, we call our beloved Zürich Hauptbahnhof just HB :-)
I just reused the term to be consistent and less confusing. No need to be Bünzli about it :P
I think Hbf is a Germany thing not just Munich.
Yes it is.
Can you explain where? Which tracks?
I have seen this comment on Reddit a few months ago, and some people were talking about it. They came to the conclusion that you cannot see the Sihl.
It's between the underground tracks of Bahnhof Löwenstrasse and the above ground: [1]
There are a lot of little neat things. For example the elevators go sideways [2] because the platform in the underground Bahnhof is wider (this is due to safety regulations etc.) [3]
BTW, what is marked as Stadttunnel in [1] is the new bike tunnel [4] which has actually been there for many years as it was supposed to be a highway tunnel but was never opened (built many, many years ago).
[1] https://img.nzz.ch/2014/05/30/1.18312867.1401474596.jpg
[2] https://www.standseilbahnen.ch/images/8000/8000.06-zuerich-h...
[3] https://implenia.com/fileadmin/implenia.com/referenzen/durch...
[4] https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/content/dam/web/de/mobilitaet/v...
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.
with sufficient density and priority on roads, a tram network might be better, other than having to wait outside in bad weather
The public transport coverage especially with tram in Zürich is already amazing
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.
I don’t think that’s the causal relationship. Even if the stakeholders were purely the listeners: radios are in cars. Basically all the radio listeners aren’t just drivers they are driving.
Huh, I wondered why Tierspital station is so strange. TIL!
> The trams also switch to the left side as the doors are only one side.
... Wait, what? That seems like a serious false economy...
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.
Feels like you're limiting your options quite significantly, though. It's not just underground; elevated trams will often have island stops, and even street-level ones do sometimes.
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.
This is insane. Never saw anything like it.
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.
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.
Châtelet is there, you have to click on the 3D icon to experience the full majesty of its unending corridors in 3D
There even is a section on Chatelet Les Halles if you scroll down. Insane station.
Indeed it is, I don't know how I missed it the first time!
Zooming working perfectly on my galaxy s23.
Also, Châtelet les Halles is available just after 'Château d'eau".
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.
Why make it easier for an enemy to plan an attack on them.
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.
It’s highly likely that Russia already has detailed models of every stations in Ukraine. If they didn’t before the war, they do now. Mapping public infrastructure doesn’t require a lot of spying.
But you have to understand that information control during war requires a shift of mindset. It’s better to start controlling everything which could be used by the enemy even if they probably already have it than try to establish complex rules. It gives good habits to people.
Most, if not all, of the stations were build during Soviet times. Russia have the original maps of most of them.
Of course they know where the stations are. But they don’t necessarily know the precise local of all the underground tunnels, exits, mechanical rooms, equipment, etc. The underground network is far more complex than what the consumer map hanging on the wall in the station shows.
During the Cold War, Russia managed to map huge parts of the world, sometimes with higher quality and more accurate measurements than the countries themselves! Especially noteworthy considering that some of those countries (like the UK) were trying their hardest to prevent those sort of maps being made in the first place, yet the Russians ended up with better maps of the UK than UK themselves.
Considering that that happened decades ago, I'm guessing their (and others) capability of doing those sort of things have only improved, not gotten worse. But that's just me guessing.
I'd like to remind you that Russia is not the USSR. Surely the technology has significantly improved since, but some capabilities are definitely lost. One example is them not being able to build more strategic bombers.
Surely they already have detailed schematics? The USSR had a mapping project of hilarious scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqzwsM6eoQ
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.
Can we not politicize the hard work of a person? In NY there's only a handful of stations drawn and not a single american complained about it.
Very impressive work.
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.
Why don't they block the shortcut to anyone but whitelisted people that applied beforehand?
That was also the case in NYC, and that's why there are so many long tunnels: each company tried to reach customers where they were.
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.
As part of DART+ Southwest, they're building a new station, Heuston West, where the disused Heuston Platform 10 (the one with the through lines) is now. It'll. be on the DART line and provide service to, presumably, Grand Canal Dock, via the Phoenix Park Tunnel (some commuter trains from Grand Canal Dock already use the tunnel and pass Heuston, but platform 10 hasn't been in use since before the tunnel was reopened). I'd assume that Houston and Heuston West will be linked. Won't be done til 2029, tho, and if any part of it slips it will be building the new station (Irish Rail is historically bad at that).
Jungfernstieg station in Hamburg has its own app to navigate out of the labyrinth even, with (I suppose) official 3D model data [1].
[1]: https://zaubar.com/app?url=zaubar.dev/hochbahn?scene=010
Love this project. Back in my transit blogging days, one of the themes was short and long transfers. And here this idea immediately starts surfacing just looking at the stations - the crazy mazes with long tunnels are cool to explore on paper, but suck for actual transfers. It adds slogs in the middle of the trips, and kind of discourages transit use because trips seem longer and more work.
When scrolling down, the author actually includes a long discussion on the best possible transfer layouts! Many of the terrible stations over time are of course historically grown, evolved over time, and weren't the result of some maniac evil genius deciding to create miserable transfers. Systems are built sometimes over a hundred years, so a later station is added mostly where it can fit, not a as a result of some master plan.
But there's also ways to deal with these issues, which can be found in Berlin.
1) for the recently opened "Unter den linden" station, which is a transfer between a new extension (u5) and a 100-year-old line (u6), a station on the old line was actually moved by 180m so that the transfer would be good. (That is, the old station was closed and a new station built a bit a distance away)
2) in general in Berlin, especially after WWII, a lot of the subway construction followed a very long term master plan (to the extend that West Berlin actually planned a network for all of Berlin, even though the East was in another country behind the iron curtain). When stations were built, the planners "knew" it would be a transfer some day, so they added in accomodations ("Bauvorleistung" or preparations ahead of actual construction), often whole station shells for the future line it would connect to. This resulted in a lot of short transfers even when lines were built decades apart. And it also resulted in a bunch of ghost stations, which have yet to be connected to lines.
A very cool project, and a great resource for people with reduced mobility - I semi-regularly use Transport for London's station drawings (linked on this website) over the official accessibility map, which doesn't differentiate between stairs and escalators for example.
Incredible work!
I first looked at _regular_ stations, but once I understood that it was done by a single guy, I had to look at Paris' Mordor: Châtelet.
The 3D view looks like an ants nest, as expected.
Very impressed by the work done!
> Paris' Mordor: Châtelet.
"Worst of all, the air was full of fumes; breathing was painful and difficult, and a dizziness came on them, so that they staggered and often fell. And yet their wills did not yield, and they struggled on."
The issue with Châtelet - aside from how crowded it is - is that it’s two stations masquerading as one, same as Montparnasse-Bienvenüe.
Once you know what’s on which side and that the directions in the main hall are purposefully made to have you meander for flow control and you can just cut through, it gets a lot more manageable.
There is an article in ElPais from 2020 about the author, Albert Guillaumes, and his creative process. Very interesting read! (texts are in Spanish though)
https://verne.elpais.com/verne/2020/08/20/articulo/159791558...
Holy shit! This is an incredible piece of work.
And they are almost all drawn “manually”! I am SO impressed by the dedication
> For the last 10 years I have been able to draw around 2,547 stations
> A pen, a notebook, a bit of spatial vision and the willingness to navigate all the staircases, corridors, platforms and mezzanines are enough to draw a station
> Due to the boredom provoked by the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, I decided to digitalize all the sketches I had drawn in since the early 2010s
Pretty impressive! Interesting shoutout to Längenfeldgasse (Vienna) for the cross-platform interchange. This is a pretty popular station to get to Schönbrunn Palace & Zoo, as such the majority of people changing stay on the platform and you really physically see the lean design in motion. This can probably only be done during the design phase otherwise to costly to ever change if it's even possible.
I was never able to build mental model of Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Most of the times was simply following the signs and yup, the layout is complicated.
OMG this is amazing! I've checked my station (Velázquez - Madrid) and it is 100% accurate. Also, the 3D stations are insane! ¡Enhorabona!
This is pretty shockingly detailed. I zoomed into my city of Cologne germany thinking there'd be nothing showed here since we don't have a 'real' metro but rather a Stadtbahn system that's partially separate from the street grid and partially on the streets.
Turns out they had excellent descriptions, models and info of all of our stations.
Leipzig is rather inconsistent.
Hauptbahnhof (main station) is incomplete, or possibly overly pedantic; it's missing the "Westseite" station part where tram 9 stops (it doesn't pass through the 4 middle tracks where the other trams make their stops.) It's technically listed as a separate stop on plans, but last I checked it's considered the same stop for transfers (i.e. you don't get "walk from station A to station B" instructions.) It's also almost directly above the subterranean S-Bahn tracks that are shown, so just by location it should be included… (and it's also misspelled Leizpig, which is a little funny.)
For Bayerischer Bahnhof and Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz, the tram stops are completely missing.
This is so neat! I hope at some point in the future cities and/or nation-states provide real time 3d environments of their built environment, with highlights for public transit, public spaces, food, government services, etc. Like if gis systems were better standardized and have these models integrated into them.
Seattle has been a mess of last minute bus stop changes that aren't propagated to Google maps before you find yourself missing your bus. And even checking the metro page directly sometimes isn't up to date with sudden construction closures
If you want to see a ridiculous amount of escalators, take a look at the Collblanc station in Barcelona. It takes 6 escalators to transfer between the L5 and L9S lines.
Been in that one when visiting Barcelona, transferring from the metro from the airport to the L5. I was not expecting the endless tower of escalators.
A while back I was in Berlin, and got lost in Nollendorfplatz station (which is not particularly _big_) for about ten minutes. Now, for various reasons I had been awake for about 36 hours, so mostly blamed it on that, but if this site is correct it confirms my suspicion that that is a weird station. U1 and U3 are on different levels for different directions!
Maybe not common, but not an uncommon design. It is so you can transfer between lines by crossing the platform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-platform_interchange https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5hXH_mLPzw
This again? The site is from 2012, does not use https, and has not changed since it was posted last time (7 times already)
I guess... https://xkcd.com/1053/
Perfect.
Nice! Would nice to have Maashaven Rotterdam, being the highest elevated one in the Netherlands. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maashaven_metro_station
With "highest" being a mere ~15m above sea level :p
Yeah all the Dutchies get vertigo there :D
Very nice work, consider also eventually adding Athens and Thessaloniki stations.
This is a remarkable feat. Amazing.
I’d like to add an interesting metric: density of subway/metro stations as measured by number of stations per square kilometer.
In European cities,
City, Metro System, Stations, City Area (km²), Density (stations/km²):
1. Paris, Metro de Paris, 244, 105, 2.32
2. Berlin, U‑Bahn only, 173, 892, ~0.19
3. London Underground (London Tube), ~270, 1,572, ~0.17
4. Madrid, Metro de Madrid, ~300, 605, ~0.50
Paris takes the lead, not just in Europe but globally, with ≈2.32 stations/km². Madrid has a dense network too (≈0.50), though well behind Paris. Berlin (U‑Bahn only) and London have much lower densities (~0.17–0.19). Rome’s iconic metro is relatively sparse in terms of station density compared to other major European and Asian cities.
Here’s how European and Asian cities stack: 1. Paris (~2.32 stations/km²) 2. Seoul (~1.27) 3. Madrid (~0.50) 4. Tokyo (~0.46) 5. London (~0.17) 6. Berlin (~0.19) 7. Hong Kong (~0.09) 8. Shanghai (~0.06) 9. Rome (~0.057)
Seoul is highest among major Asian metro systems in terms of station concentration, making it the city in Asia with the densest metro network per square kilometer. Seoul has 768 stations in its metropolitan subway system spread across the city proper area of 605 km². By comparison, Tokyo’s combined metro (Tokyo Metro + Toei) has around 286 stations over ~621 km, giving a density of about 0.46 stations/km². Beijing has 523 stations but the city covers about 16,411 km²—yielding a much lower density (~0.03 stations/km²). Shanghai’s figure fluctuates due to rapid expansions: 409 unique stations from early 2025 data.
In addition to density, another interesting metric is the number of street-level entrances (exit/entry points). Counting just stations ignores how many access points are available to the public. More entrances = better coverage, shorter walking distances, improved accessibility, especially in dense urban zones. Examples from Paris are: Saint‑Lazare station (Lines 3, 12, 13, 14) has 11 entrances. Hotel de Ville (Lines 1 & 11) has 7 entrances. Madeleine station (Lines 8, 12, 14) has 5 accesses with 7 separate entrances. Alesia station (Line 4) has 6 entrances. Opera station (Lines 3,7,8) has 3 main entrances.
On average, Paris Metro stations have approximately 3–6 street-level entrances, with major hubs having 7–11. Paris doesn’t just have many stations, it maximizes them with multiple entry points, making its system exceptionally accessible over its territory. Seoul also scores similar in accessibility due to its exit-rich stations, especially in dense areas. Other major metros (Tokyo, Madrid, London) lag when entry points are factored in.
I did not include US cities but I believe New York City might be notable.
> 4. Madrid, Metro de Madrid, ~300, 605, ~0.50
> [...] Madrid has a dense network too (≈0.50), though well behind Paris.
As a native of Madrid, I must point out that using the nominal surface area of the municipality of Madrid (~605 km²) is misleading for these purposes due to the Monte del Pardo [0] and Soto de Viñuelas [1], two fenced off forest areas covering around 180 km² between them. The impact of these areas on the nominal surface area of the city is visually obvious when you compare the outlines of Madrid and Paris administrative areas:
+ Madrid: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/5326784
+ Paris: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/7444
As a result, the relevant surface for estimating the density of Metro stations in Madrid should be at most ~425 km². While one may arguably also want to exclude the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes from the surface area of Paris, even the "de-Pardo'd" surface area of Madrid still contains significant non-urban areas such as the Casa de Campo forest, large non-built-up areas, and even most of its airport.
(In any case though, after this pedantic "well ackshually", I must also point out that a few Madrid Metro stations actually fall outside of its municipal limits. I would get out more, but I live in a town without a Metro)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_de_El_Pardo
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soto_de_Viñuelas
Is Paris 6 times smaller than Madrid and 15 times smaller than London? Seems suspicious to me. What exactly is the boundary of this "area" and how does it relate to the subway network?
A significant proportion of the administrative area of Madrid is covered by fenced-off forests. Plus it covers other swathes of non-developed land and even most of its airport. The administrative area of Paris proper, on the other hand, is fully urbanised. See here for comparison:
+ Madrid: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/5326784
+ Paris: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/7444
London is a whole different animal. While Madrid and Paris are arguably "similar" cities in terms of urban design and residential density, London and UK cities in general are completely different.
Yeah, I don't think the density numbers quoted mean anything useful.
I just had a quick look at a metro station I know, Sèvres Babylone in Paris, and it seems like there's a mistake in the model, adding a corridor that doesn't exist in the actual station.
Wow. How?
Incredibly impressive. Is there a public dataset that was used to build this?
The page footnote says that all sketches were hand drawn by the author over a 10 year period, and digitized during COVID by the power of extreme boredom.
So they are not renders of 3D models?
See also this 3D model of Shinjuku station, Tokyo:
https://satoshi7190.github.io/Shinjuku-indoor-threejs-demo/
Nice, while Shinjuku is much larger and more complex than others it has been really intuitive using it in the real world.
Given the title, I was surprised to find Canadian metro stations on the list, even my native Ottawa!
Very nice. One nitpick: Malaga-Fuengirola C-1 line is suburban train and not metro (C stands for Cercanías)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A1laga_Metro
Warsaw Metro has 36 station but only one is included. Metro systems of Kyiv, Minsk, Saint Petersburg and Moscow are not shown at all.
Edit: Removed Vilnius as it has only plans for a metro system
Vilnius doesn't have a metro.
Right, my mistake.
Finally going to get a mental model of Jungfernstieg, Hamburg after a decade of living here. Wow.
Nitpick: there are a couple cities covered in North America as well, so not exactly European.
This is really cool — it reminds me of a Japanese subway map.
Really state of the art project and available in catalan, hell yeah! Hats off
Wow. The one relevant to me looks spot on accurate.
Well done!
Is there a reason why moscow is missing ?
Probably because he didn’t manage to visit.
The guy has probably not been there. There are tons of others not included but it's fine, just a guy.
It says "European", not "Asian".
West of the Urals is Europe. Istanbul is included, and that’s even more questionably European than Moscow, I think.
It's also not an exhaustive list anyway. At least Helsinki, Finland is missing. I think Finland is unambigiously Europe.
Did you skip geography?
Very impressive project! Congrats.
This is impressive work!
The product of extreme focus and obsessive dedication. It showed me my local subway station immediately and everything checked out. Great resource.
Awesome project.
Xing Zhilei's cats enter the chat and demand detailed texture maps.
Perhaps it doesn't work on my browser, but all I see are low fidelity, wireframe/stick 3D model projections rendered as 2D images without much detail that could be made in a few minutes.
As the title suggests it is not a website of models of European metro stations because:
(a) it contains models of North American stations, and
(b) it does not contain stations from the St Petersburg[1] or Moscow metros which are significant European metros (the Moscow metro[2] is the longest in Europe)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg_Metro
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro