What’s the busiest railway station in Paris? What are the top 20 busiest stations in France? What percentage of station traffic comes from non-passengers? You can find the answers to all of these questions in our station footfall dataset. This open-data resource offers yearly statistics on our 3,000 stations in France, and we’ve made it available to the public since 2015.

Outside Paris, information on foot traffic is derived from ticketing data for national and regional traffic. In the Paris region itself, we extrapolate the data based on headcounts made every 3-4 years.

To estimate the share of non-passengers, we use in-station surveys in the Paris region, and for other areas, we add 20%. The dataset is updated each summer.

Our station footfall dataset is useful to:

• retailers interested in opening a shop near a station
• companies that want to analyse a catchment area
• journalists
• agencies of the French State, such as the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE), the Centre for Studies on Risks, the Environment, Mobility and Regional Planning (CEREMA), and the Agency for Ecological Transition (ADEME)
• mobility researchers
• non-profits that use data to showcase a region or locality, such as Data Bzh in Brittany
• regions, cities or towns seeking to boost economic activity by bringing this data to the attention of chambers of commerce, business leaders and others

Footfall data is also valuable to us internally:

• Place de la Gare, an SNCF Gares & Connexions programme that promotes local economic development and in-station events, uses the data to encourage applications;
• Station masters use data to set the right scale for passenger services, such as handing out bottled water during heatwaves;
• AREP, our in-house architecture firm, analyses footfall data to adjust energy consumption—such as heating, cooling and lighting—in station spaces.