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.
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 photograph 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.
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 as the assumption the choice was made on changed after the already had a fleet.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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
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.
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.
https://satoshi7190.github.io/Shinjuku-indoor-threejs-demo/
3.6 million passengers per day. Wikipedia:
The main East Japan Railway Company (JR East) station and the directly adjacent private railways have a total of 35 platforms, an underground arcade, above-ground arcade and numerous hallways with another 17 platforms (52 total) that can be accessed through hallways to five directly connected stations without surfacing outside. The entire above/underground complex has well over 200 exits.
Commuter trains in many East/Southeast Asian cities like Shanghai has developed to levels comparable to Tokyo. Trains in some Central Asian cities such as Mumbai were also always notorious for congestions. I think those should also be considered more often and at greater depths, Fermi estimated if need be, than we would be just keep dropping random Shinjuku facts left and right.
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 photograph 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]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph_(transport)
... Wait, what? That seems like a serious false economy...
That said, I would have loved to see HBf on this website.
One minor nitpick: zooming the map is very slow (maybe Leaflet is not the best choice?). And the main station in Paris is missing: Châtelet-Les Halles.
Other than that, incredible work!! Amazing.
Also, Châtelet les Halles is available just after 'Château d'eau".
I also learned something, which I'd always wondered cynically but never thought to investigate. The walking connection between lines at some stations in Barcelona seems so long as to not make sense, but it's explained here that at the time the different lines and stations were dug and extended independently by different companies.
> Among the reasons for having such long corridors [in Barcelona] is the lack of planning or the vision of the metro network as a bunch of individual lines. As an example: line 1 and line 4 were extended to Urquinaona in 1932, but both lines were not connected until 1972, as they were originally operated by different companies.
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!
"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."
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
Incredibly impressive. Is there a public dataset that was used to build this?
https://satoshi7190.github.io/Shinjuku-indoor-threejs-demo/
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.