I used to live in NY, where there are tons of people who commute by train. I now live in San Francisco, where it seems very few people do. But my question is: which U.S. cities have the most people commuting to work by train? Either by sheer numbers or percentage. And how do those numbers stack up to the rest of the world. Are people more likely to commute to work by train in London? Paris? Tokyo? Berlin? Sao Paolo?
Just to be clear, I’m asking hear about above ground rail, not subways. Or at least trying to keep them separate.
We railfans have endless debates about BART and Washington Metro, but BART goes far enough outside the central city to clearly be regional rail, little different from Australian CityRail, German S-Bahn, or French RER.
As to the OP, counting gets very tricky once you reach countries that have robust national rail networks, because it’s difficult to separate the suburban commuters from the short-distance intercity passengers in places such as London Southeast, Holland, or the Rhein-Ruhr.
Right – if CityRail in New South Wales is not a “subway” system (and only a small percentage is underground), then the OP would not count it as a commuter system, but I’d guess that it carries hundreds of thousands of commuters every day. I used it myself for about 18 months to commute from home in Newcastle to work in Sydney – about 160 km or 100 miles each way – and I wasn’t the only person doing that, though the numbers built up a lot on the Central Coast in between the two cities: thousands would be commuting 100 km or more into Sydney from the Blue Mountains and Central Coast.
Wow. That’s super helpful. Thanks! I wouldn’t have thought—and didn’t—that Wikipedia wold have that information. Maybe there’s something to this internets thing, after all.
Yes, it does get tricky. I know that NYC id so big that many people do commute quite long distances while on the subway the entire time. But possibly more ride the subway to go to dinner, shopping, etc. I have no idea how to sort that out.
Just a nitpick. Tokyo has many other overground networks that connect commuters into the central part of the city. Besides JR (Japan Railways), some of the major private ones are:
Keikyu (from the south)
Tokyu (from the south and southwest)
Odakyu (from the south and southwest)
Keio (from the west)
Seibu (from the west and northwest)
Tobu (from the northwest and north)
Keisei (from the northeast)
Many of these have direct service through the two subway networks as well.
Did some quick number crunching and found that, by ratio of annual passenger rides to city population, Washington D.C has the highest rate in America, followed by Boston, New York City and Chicago (in that order).
Population was hard to judge for D.C, due to the fact that its subway system extends slightly beyond the bounds of D.C itself.
The footnote would apply to every commuter system in Spain, both above and below-ground. Spain’s short-distance train system got divided into “hubs” about ten years ago, but the middle distance ones which go from hub to hub are also often used by commuters. The train I too this morning in my commute to work and the one I took last afternoon to commute back were both middle-distance (Barcelona). And of course, many of those cercanías get as much use from non-commuters as from commuters; in the early morning, the trains from Toledo to Madrid are full of workers and return from Madrid to Toledo full of tourists - the opposite in the afternoon.
For some reason that list doesn’t include Shanghai at all, which is 3rd largest after Tokyo and Mumbai at 5.5 million passengers per day.
EDIT: just found Guangzhou Metro, China’s 3rd largest city claims a record of 7.5 million per day
I’m not sure why the OP wants to separate above ground and subway, thats really not possible. The JR lines into Tokyo are above ground for most of the way and then underground in central Tokyo and often subway lines and JR lines will share the same tracks for intervals. All of the subway lines also go above ground in Tokyo at their termination points out in the suburbs.
I don’t get the logic at all? The majority of users of the London Underground and of Tokyo Subways are also commuters in that they use it to get to and from work. Are you using the word commuter to only mean people that travel above a certain distance to work?
In my mind an inner city resident that travels 4 km on the subway to work is still a commuter.
