Work & Travel: Public transport in Tokyo

Recently, there was a piece of sad news:
Russia derailment: 21 dead in Moscow metro crash
&
V Moskve sa vykoľajilo metro, zahynulo 21 ľudí

You may think, oh, it's a big system, accidents are bound to happen.

I also recently wrote about a case of mismanagement of public transport in Wellington.

You may think, oh, Thomas, you're just a poor negativistic slob.

Well, this time around I want to show you it can actually all work much much better...

Public transport in Japan

A few random (but utterly fascinating!) facts from Wikipedia:

The Tōkaidō Shinkansen is the world's busiest high-speed rail line [and] it has transported more passengers (over 5 billion, entire network over 10 billion) than any other high-speed line in the world.

In fact, it's more than there are people on Earth. But let's go on:

Between Tokyo and Osaka, the two largest metropolises in Japan, up to thirteen trains per hour with sixteen cars each run in each direction with a minimum headway of three minutes between trains.

And what about collisions, accidents, incidents... - safety record in general? Read on:

Over the Shinkansen's 50 year history, carrying nearly 10 billion passengers, there have been no passenger fatalities due to derailments or collisions, despite frequent earthquakes and typhoons.

Public transport in Tokyo

Greater Tokyo has the most extensive urban railway network and the most used one in the world with 40 million passengers in the metro area daily. It has higher daily ridership than any other metropolitan area in the world with 14.6 billion passengers annually.

Greater Osaka comes in distant second, with 4.75 billion annual passengers, with Beijing occupying the third place @ 3.2 billion commuters. Fourth place is shared by further three urban rail systems: Seoul, Shanghai and Moscow, all ferrying 2.5 billion riders annually.

What, then, is Greater Tokyo?

The Greater Tokyo Area is a very large metropolitan area in Japan [...] A 2007 UN estimate puts the population at 35,676,000, making it by far the world's most populous metropolitan area ---

--- with the rest of the pack (other metropolises on Earth) coming at about 20 million.

The following might be of note:

**Busiest stations**
Station	Daily ridership	Passengers annually
1. Shinjuku	3.65 million	1.3 billion
2. Shibuya	3.06 million	1.1 billion
3. Ikebukuro	2.71 million	915 million
4. Yokohama	2.09 million	770 million
5. Kita-senju	-	543 million
6. Tokyo	1.12 million	396 million
7. Shinagawa	910,000	347 million
8. Takadanobaba	900,000	323 million
9. Shimbashi	850,000	-
10. Akihabara	-	-

What you're looking at is a compiled list of top 10 busiest suburban rail stations in Greater Tokyo (Shinjuku is actually listed in the Guinness World Records Book as the single busiest railway station on this planet). However, this list is pretty consistent with a list of the busiest train stations in the world, as evidenced by this article:
The 51 Busiest Train Stations in the World (45 out of 50 world's busiest railway stations are in Japan!)
&
this one.

Just to make you wonder and confound you even more, the circular Yamanote Line (it's a neverending loop) passes through 8 of these top 10 stations (all except Yokohama and Kita-senju - but really, Kita-senju's a stone throw away from this line) and all but two(!) of its 29 stations are interchanges (you can transfer to another line).

Do you think there are any traffic jams, queues, long waiting times or frequent accidents at these stations? No. They all look inconspicuously quiet (considering the passenger numbers when compared to, say, Europe), barring a few station attendants, who, at morning peak times, sometimes help push people into the trains, like sardines in a can: