Fun Facts ← back to map

Extracted from 18,131 subway stations, 163,498 rail stations, and 45,928 airports in our dataset (after deduplication).

18,131

Subway stations

45,928

Airports

2.5:1

Airport to subway ratio

China owns the subway world

~8,800 stations (49% of all subway stations on earth) are in China.

City	Stations
Shanghai	575
New York	464
Beijing	407
Seoul	404
Chengdu	367
Paris	332
Tokyo	260
London	254
Moscow	241

Regional ratios

The global 2.5:1 ratio hides extreme regional variation:

Region	Subways	Airports	Airports per subway
Africa & Middle East	566	5,146	9.1:1
Oceania	40	3,759	94:1
North America	1,535	18,569	12:1
South America	743	6,720	9.0:1
Europe	4,647	7,401	1.6:1
Asia	11,026	4,111	0.37:1 — nearly 3× more subways than airports

Geographic extremes

Subway stations

Direction	Station
Northernmost	Mellunmäki — Helsinki, Finland (60.24°N)
Southernmost	Newport — Melbourne, Australia (37.84°S)
Easternmost	Martin Place — Sydney, Australia (151.21°E)
Westernmost	Keone'ae / UH West O'ahu — Honolulu, Hawai'i (158.05°W)

Airports

Direction	Airport
Northernmost	Ward Hunt Island — Canadian Arctic (83.09°N)
Southernmost	Jack F. Paulus Skiway — practically on the South Pole (89.99°S)
Easternmost	Rabi Island — Fiji (179.98°E)
Westernmost	Matei Airport — Fiji (179.88°W)

The easternmost and westernmost airports are both in Fiji, ~4 km apart on either side of the 180th meridian.

Best airport names

Batman Airport — Batman, Turkey
Chicken Airport — Alaska (town population: ~7)
Useless Loop Airstrip — Western Australia
Dead Cow Field — North Carolina
Dead Dog Airport — North Carolina
Crazy Bob's Airport — Ohio
Hell'er High Water Airport — California
Deadhorse Airport — Prudhoe Bay, Alaska

Subway station quirks

Stalingrad — Paris still has 2 metro stations named for the battle
栄 — Nagoya, Japan. A single kanji character meaning "prosperity"
Sé — São Paulo. Shortest Latin-script station name (2 characters)
Lehel — Munich. The only palindrome station name found
437 stations worldwide have no name at all

Most common names

Subway stations	Airports
奥体中心 / Olympic Center (15 stations)	"Pista" / runway (74 airports)
会展中心 / Convention Center (12)	"Campo De Aterrizaje" / landing field (53)
体育中心 / Sports Center (10)	Johnson Airport (10)
人民广场 / People's Square (7)	Hilltop Airport (9)
Central (8)	Miller Airport (9)

Data cleanup

OpenStreetMap mappers often tag individual platforms, entrances, or line intersections as separate station nodes. To deduplicate, we group stations by name, then within each name group greedily cluster any two nodes within 500m of each other into one — averaging their coordinates. Here's what that removed:

Dataset	Before	After	Removed
Subways (strict)	18,021	16,233	1,788 (9.9%)
Subways	20,509	18,131	2,378 (11.6%)
All rail	195,835	163,498	32,337 (16.5%)
Airports	46,211	45,928	283 (0.6%)

Tram and light rail stops had the most duplicates (16.5%). Airports were the cleanest. The worst offenders by city:

City	Extra nodes	Typical cause
Marseille	97	Nearly every station had 5 nodes (one per entrance)
Singapore	68	Multiple platforms tagged as separate stations
Paris	58	Line intersections mapped as separate nodes