[kevin_p]

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....

[numpad0]

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]

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.

[dmoy]

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.