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Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

aruarian.dance

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Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#271

Post by kccqzy »

sriamanan wrote: post #184
eloisius wrote: post #18

I think they are even more useful in Taiwan. Every single transit system across the entire island that I’ve ever encountered accepts EasyCard (悠遊卡). Even ferries. So does every convenience store, and even a lot of proper restaurants and stores. They are also fast, like you don’t even have to break your strike while passing the turnstiles to enter the metro.

>the entire island Is it China's influence that Taiwan is not being referred to as a country.

The territory of Taiwan the country is not just Taiwan the island. There are other islands belonging to Taiwan such as Kinmen.

If OP never set foot on these other islands it is simply more accurate to say the island rather than the country. But this is just an HN comment, OP might not have given the island/country word choice a second thought.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#272

Post by hocuspocus »

xuki wrote: post #213
hocuspocus wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that on global Pixels it isn't hard to enable, either via root or flashing Japanese variants of the factory images.

This is such a Hacker News comment.

Yes I'm not claiming it's ideal, it'd be nice not to worry about such things as a tourist, it can't be that hard or expensive for Google to just let everyone use the feature.

But at least if you move to Japan, you can essentially get a Japanese flavored Pixel at the small cost of a factory unlock/relock.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#273

Post by UncleEntity »

mmooss wrote: post #245
suddenexample wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only enabled by the difference in culture though, right? Japanese culture has a much higher emphasis on order and following the rules - I don't know that this "open-by-default" system would work in, for instance, the US.

As I said in another comment, I've used US systems where you board the vehicle (bus/train) before paying, and bus drivers wave you past if you can't pay. On the train, you get a free ride to the next stop.

On the Phoenix area light rail the only way they (used to, at least) tell if you have a valid ticket is random security patrols checking everyone on the train. No gates, no nothing.

During covid they even stopped checking the validity of the tickets and all you needed was to be in possession of 'a ticket' -- I used the same one for a couple years and still have the thing in my wallet in case I ever go back there again.

Couldn't even begin to count the number of times I saw people get off the train as soon as they saw security get on and just wait for the next train.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#274

Post by pkage »

kccqzy wrote: post #270

From the user experience perspective, the Bay Area Clipper card might be the closest to these IC cards in Asia. It's also a stored value card. The official Clipper app allows you to transfer the card to be an NFC card on the phone and inspect the value on it, entirely offline. (Of course to support the use case of automatically adding value to the card when it's below the threshold necessarily requires the fare reade…

The DC Metro system operates similarly.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#276

Post by f_devd »

ksec wrote: post #137

I still remember when Apple announced their FeliCa support. And FeliCa became NFC-F standard there is a potential of Apple Wallet and Apple Cash ( Before both were announced ) for world wide usage to fight against the march of QR Code. They could have a store value card that works worldwide. Effectively bringing Octopus or Suica card to the world. I even remember there were proposal for future version of Felica that…

> There is also a new NFC proposal ( again my google fu is not helping ) that allows multiple NFC card / tags to be read at the same time

This is already in standard NFC-A/B, usually just called the 'collision avoidance' or 'select' protocol, effectively doing a binary search over the uid space (iirc) asking particular bitmasks of uids to respond. The main thing is that it used on the reader side, not the (emulated) card side so I'm not sure what the support for multiple emulated cards is like (and if there is a different proposal for that).

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#277

Post by Symbiote »

hoppp wrote: post #275

How is it compared to the Danish rejsekort? That works kind of similar, its very fast too

Japan's cards are faster and are accepted in convenience shops.

However, in Denmark many passengers (commuters with weekly or longer tickets, people with smartphone tickets, people with paper tickets) don't need to do anything at all when they leave a train as there aren't any barriers, and that can't be beaten for speed.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#278

Post by AnthonyMouse »

lmz wrote: post #267
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…

The majority of the fees go to the issuing bank (as the entity providing credit), not the card network.

It's the card network using their excessive leverage as a result of a lack of competition that allows the issuing bank to charge such high fees. Because if you accept Visa, you have to accept every Visa.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#280

Post by ZeroNietzsche »

astrange wrote: post #197
suddenexample wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only enabled by the difference in culture though, right? Japanese culture has a much higher emphasis on order and following the rules - I don't know that this "open-by-default" system would work in, for instance, the US.

Japanese transit-using society is old and middle-class; those are the kind of people who follow rules. Americans are often more rule bound than Japanese people (we have HOAs and Nextdoor), but we just don't respect transit systems as much because we think of them as gifts we give to the poor/mentally ill/homeless. And then a lot of Americans have an anti-gentrification ideology ("rent-lowering gunshots" or "neighborh…

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