How many people cross Shibuya Crossing each day?

How to get close to this number

Multiply crossings by cycle. The explanation gives up to three thousand people per green light, and a busy pedestrian signal cycles a few times a minute for most of the day. Three thousand times a few hundred cycles a day gives a figure in the millions, and rate-times-cycles is the standard route for any throughput question.

What makes the number possible is that this is a transport interchange rather than a street corner. Several major railway lines converge there, so the crossing is the surface expression of an underground passenger flow — the pedestrians are not arriving on foot from elsewhere, they are emerging from trains. Any extreme pedestrian figure is really a rail figure.

The tourist point in the explanation is a genuine feedback loop worth noticing: the crossing became famous for being crowded, which draws visitors who come specifically to cross it, which makes it more crowded. A handful of places in the world are congested partly because their congestion is the attraction, and this is the best-documented one.