Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

aruarian.dance

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 302 posts

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#251

Post by Symbiote »

m-schuetz wrote: post #217
movedx wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You raise a good point here. There's a degree of trust here, too. Trust placed on the consumer to do the right thing and pay. I'd also say there's an additional consideration being put forward by the operator: sometimes people just need a ride every now and then. I've been Japan three times now and I've seen several incidents of the guards letting people just walk through without a ticket because they explained some…

I've went through gates without ticket several times for reasons like access to coin lockers or switching to the other track when I've entered the wrong one. Gate guards usually hand you a slip that explains the situation at the other gate or when leaving again.

I've had the opposite: I entered a large station at the west entrance as a transfer from a local train run by a different company. The platform I needed was next to the east entrance. Fine. On the platform was a sign (in English!) reminding tourists they needed a seat reservation, which I hadn't purchased.

The sign said the machine to issue the seat supplements was at the east entrance — the other side of the gates from me, of course.

The guard at the gates understood me, but said I must exit back the way I came, i.e. all the way back to the west entrance. That side of the station 'belonged' to the other railway company, and there wasn't a machine to sell the ticket I needed. I could either walk the really long way around by road (not through the station) or queue at the general ticket office.

So I missed that train.

In general, I found the train ticketing system for regional or long-distance trains needlessly complicated compared to Europe, with base tickets, express supplements and seat reservations all separate fees, and coming as 1, 2 or 3 bits of paper depending on I know not what.

On one occasion a journey with a transfer came on 7 separate tickets. (Of course, the Japanese approach to this problem is not to simplify the ticketing system, but to invent a machine that can suck in all 7 tickets, cancel the relevant ones, and discharge them neatly arranged.)

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#252

Post by Symbiote »

> Compare the speed of passing through a ticket gate on the Underground to a Tokyo ticket gate

The video in London is showing tourists/visitors, since they all have paper tickets and half of them are fumbling around. The Japanese video shows people familiar with the system.

The Japanese gates are certainly faster, but not as much as shown.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#253

Post by lmm »

makeitdouble wrote: post #224
lmm wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan hugely subsidizes public transport both directly and indirectly, e.g. almost all employers will pay for employees to commute by public transport but not by car, because the government heavily incentivises them to do so. The Japanese transport providers are indeed more entrepreneurial about this kind of stuff, but I think that's more a case of Japan having high trust in government and quasi-governmental entities…

Companies paying for public transport is a matter of flooring the commute cost: (almost) nobody lives in an area with no public transportation and car commute costs more, so companies will pay the price for lowest commute and you get to decide what you do with it. Same thing if your train transit costs 440 yens at base rate but you decide to ride first class or even one of the special luxury trains at a thousand+ yen…

> Companies paying for public transport is a matter of flooring the commute cost: (almost) nobody lives in an area with no public transportation and car commute costs more, so companies will pay the price for lowest commute and you get to decide what you do with it.

If that was the reason they would simply not pay for commutes at all, as is normal in most other countries.

> Government has little to do with most of it, subsidies only matter on the smaller, super low volume lines where rising prices would kill the traffic.

Nah. Both the railway companies and the government lean into the myth of their being private operations because it suits everyone, but the "private" railway companies were set up with immensely valuable government funded capital assets and would never have been able to operate without them, they rely on government support for any substantial new capital investments, and they have the relevant governments as significant investors, in many cases the largest investors. Yes JR central is immensely profitable if you accept the accounting fiction that the tokaido shinkansen simply popped into existence one day and is worth nothing.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#254

Post by AnthonyMouse »

eloisius wrote: post #249
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rewards programs are the anti-competitive lock-in. Visa and Mastercard charge high fees because their dominant market position forces merchants to accept them. Then they use part of the fees to bribe customers with rewards programs. A new payment network doesn't have leverage against merchants so can't charge the same high fees and therefore can't offer the same rewards programs, but then they can't get consumers…

Even being aware of all that, I don't feel I've been defrauded. I don't have to carry around a wad of cash that can be lost or stolen, and on the rare occasions that I need to I can get the help of the credit card company in recovering money when I actually get defrauded.

None of those things have anything to do with interchange fees or rewards programs.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#256

Post by ulfw »

neckro23 wrote: post #189
aidenn0 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wonder who it is that has all of these android phones in the US (nearly 40% by the statistics). In my extended friend group only one person other than me uses an Android phone.

Android is overwhelmingly preferred by working-class people, in my experience. The phones are simply cheaper.

Or more powerful and more expensive, such as every single foldable phone on the market, including my Oppo Find N5.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#257

Post by bigfatkitten »

bondant wrote: post #145
threeseed wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia was the first country to widely support chip/pin and then tap/pay. Even here cash is coming back into vogue as costs are pushing small businesses to evade taxes. I was in Tokyo last week and it was similar businesses i.e. mostly smaller and in lower margin industries.

>Australia was the first country to widely support chip/pin Do you have any source on that? I find it rather surprising.

Australia wasn’t the first, but it did have the second highest adoption rate of contactless payments in the world at one point, behind New Zealand.

In Australia, it helped that there were only about five POS acquirers of note (the big four banks plus Tyro), who owned pretty much all the terminal hardware.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#258

Post by lxgr »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #202
lxgr wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is definitely exacerbated by human behavior. There are almost always multiple turnstiles, but I've seen groups of people managing to block all of them simultaneously , figuring out how to use them...

The last time I was in NYC was 10+ years ago, but from what I recall, operating the turnstiles correctly required some experience: you need to know that they require manual operation (not obvious to first-time users), and then you also have to operate them at the correct speed (going too fast doesn’t let you through). Systems with fare gates (i.e. most systems worldwide) don’t have these problems, because it’s obviou…

That’s true for Metrocards and paper single ride tickets, but no longer an issue for OMNY.

Most delays with OMNY seem to be due to the fact that people need to unlock their phone or pick a card because they don’t have express transit enabled.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#259

Post by lxgr »

tonyhart7 wrote: post #240
em500 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Practically, many people however only start thinking about possibly needing to open some app to display it while they’re already blocking everybody else’s way at the transit gate… This really comes down to adoption. In China, where QR is ubiquitous, almost everyone has the QR ready to scan well before they reach the scanner.

if its work on country that has billions of passenger, it would works on everywhere else

Not necessarily. Regular riders vs. infrequent riders or tourists can make a big difference, for example.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#260

Post by lxgr »

notpushkin wrote: post #237
lxgr wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe QR codes are mostly intended to replace paper/magnetic single-ride tickets, not IC cards, in most transit systems. Magnetic tickets are already slower than IC cards, and are both more expensive to produce and harder to recycle than QR codes printed on regular paper.

I’ve only used them twice (on Sinkansen, and on a regular train in Hokkaido), and it was nearly instantaneous – about as fast as an IC card. The whole experience felt like magic: you put the tichets into a slot, whoosh! – and you pick them up on the other side. It is true that they are expensive to produce and hard to recycle, though, so it’s a good idea overall. But I’ll miss this iconic experience (or hopefully the…

It’s not quite the same, but if you tap your IC card with a preloaded Shinkansen ticket, you at least get a rapidly printed seat indicator :)

Another cool thing about the paper tickets is that you can supposedly insert them stacked (i.e. both Shinkansen and regional transit ticket at a transit gate), and the gate will figure out which one to eat and which one to hand back to you!

Post reply on HN