Will Baude questions how to get onto the least-crowded subway car on a metro station, based upon where the stairs are.　He's playing around with the DC Metro, which whilst cleaner than New York's, is still a chaotic ant-hill designed by overly-hyper children compared to the sheer reason that is Japanese public transport. The explanation below will make more sense if you read his long and convoluted game-theory argument, but suffice it to say that planners in Osaka thought ahead of Mr. Baude and solved the problem already.

OK, the organization is less apparent in Tokyo than in Osaka, but it was immediately obvious on the old Hankyu line on which I commuted for a year. At the first stop--Takarazuka--the stairs came down right in front of the exits to the first train. At the next stop, the train from the upstairs platform was staggered by the length of a train car--meaning that the stairs came down in front of the second car. And so on, and so on, all the way to Umeda station (if it was a direct, express train) in which the main platform was right in front of the last car. Because of this, the natural momentum of passengers, and their habit of entering a car which was near the stairs, usually because they arrived just before the train was leaving, cars filled up in a gradual, logical, and ordered procession.

You can notice the same kind of system in the construction of the Tokyo metro, although it's a bit more convoluted and there are exceptions. (This is to be expected in places where there are more than two exits, and a number of complex levels above the station.) Nonetheless, station design normally looks like it's been planned with the movement of passengers in mind, which is a big change from what I recall in D.C.