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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 caveat

I spent a while looking into this and it looks like it's mostly legit. Japanese stations really do seem to be bigger. Having said that, there are two big caveats that make the gap smaller. First, they're double-counting a lot of passengers in Japan. Tokyo subway isn't a single thing, it's a collection of independent companies, so you need to tap out of one station and tap back into another when changing lines. The JP numbers on Wikipedia are the sum of all the separate Shinjuku stations, which would count a lot of transfer passengers twice. And second, the table is counting Tokyo's metro system but doesn't include Chinese cities' subways. There are no subway-only stations listed even though plenty of them meet the 30 million passengers/year cutoff. But that's not as big an issue as you might think because even the busiest ones are still far smaller than the big Japanese stations - The busiest is Xizhimen with 237,000 passengers per day, which would translate to 87 million per year. Beijing South Station's subway stop gets 211,000/day = 77 Mn/year, so if we added that the rail passengers it would bring the total to 318 million - but most of them would be going to/from the railway station so that's doing the same sort of double counting as I mentioned in the previous point. Source for Beijing subway passengers: https://xinwen.bjd.com.cn/content/s684153bfe4b0380e186d0b6e.html https://xinwen.bjd.com.cn/content/s684153bfe4b0380e186d0b6e....

dmoy 1y ago
Yea subway is definitely a whole different ball game. I've ridden Beijing subway a lot, but I was not prepared for Shanghai People's Station. Even in the off season that was nuts. Evidently down in Guangzhou there are even busier subway stations, with some exceeding 1.25m per day.
numpad0 1y ago
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.
- nornij 1y ago
  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.
  - numpad0 1y ago
    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.
    - nornij 1y ago
      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.

dmoy 1y ago

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

numpad0 1y ago

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.

nornij 1y ago
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.
- numpad0 1y ago
  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.
  - nornij 1y ago
    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.