This week we're taking a look at the surprisingly complicated question of which city has the largest metro in the world. As with so often with these things, the answer is: it depends how you count.

Yesterday we did number of stations. Today, we're measuring by route length.

You'd think, by restricting ourselves to a simple, one-dimensional numerical measure, that working out which city had the longest metro system in the world would be simple, wouldn't you?

Ha. No such luck. This time (spoilers), the root of the confusion lies in the vexed question of what counts as one metro network.

One oft-cited candidate for the world’s longest metro network is the one on Seoul, which only opened in 1974 but by 2013 included 987.5km of route on 18 lines. That's pretty much enough to get you from London to Marseille. No other city comes close.

So why is this question remotely contentious? Because it's surprisingly unclear whether that metro should be counted as one system or several. It includes lines 1-9, the subway proper, which is operated by the Seoul Metropolitan Rapid Transit Corporation and the Seoul Metro (with which it'll merge next year).

But it also includes routes run by national rail operator Korail. Most contentiously, it includes lines run by satellite cities, such as the Incheon Transit Corporation, which operates trains in, well, Incheon.

An extract from a map of Seoul's complete metro network created by Wikipedia User IRTC1015. You can see the terrifyingly complicated full version here.

All these operators provide a single integrated network – but it's still the equvialent of measuring the London Underground by counting Overground, DLR, and so forth, or of counting the RER and Transilien as part of the Paris Metro. We are in danger, in other words, of comparing apples and oranges.

So what if you try to stick to apples alone? Look at lines 1-9 alone, and the network measures only 311km.

Which is quite a lot smaller and probably not the biggest in the world at all.

Other candidates for the top slot can’t promise the 900km+ of route that the wider definitions of the Seoul metro do, but the figures they do cite are probably less contentious.

One is the Shanghai Metro, which runs to 548km and counting. In 2013, it achieved the distinction of becoming the first Chinese metro network to cross provincial boundaries, when line 11 was extended into the satellite city of Kunshan in neighbouring Jiangsu province.

There's talk of extending it further, to connect up with metro systems of the cities of Suzhou and Wuxi, both of which are 100km away or more, too. Not bad given that Shanghai didn't open its first metro line until 1993.

It isn't the only monster subway system that's sprouted in China recently either. The Beijing Subway, first opened in 1969, is the country's oldest, so it got a bit of a head start on Shanghai. Today, it runs 18 lines, serves 319 stations, and stretches for 527km.

Schematic map of Beijing's subway, created by Wikipedia Users Ran and Hat600.

This is another one of those networks which has more than one operator: this one's split between the state-owned Beijing Mass Transit Railway Operation Corp (15 lines) and the Beijing MTR Corp (a joint venture with the Hong Kong transit authorities, which operates three). Between them, in 2014, they carried 3.4bn passengers.

One interesting feature of Beijing's metro is its station names, which, translated literally, mean things like Smooth Justice, Heavenly Peace Gate and (less appealingly) Cholera Camp. So, there you go.

Here, best we can tell, with all the caveats about different cities playing by different rules here, is the top 10 of metros proper:

Shanghai Metro – 548km

Beijing Subway – 527km

London Underground – 402km

New York Subway – 373km

Seoul Subway – 332km

Moscow Metro – 328km

Madrid Metro – 294km

Guangzhou Metro – 240km

Mexico City Metro – 227km

Nanjing Metro – 224km

Tomorrow: we try to count passenger numbers and things get really complicated.

Research: Suren Prasad.