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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

#41

Post by chgs »

astrange wrote: post #37
walthamstow wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the complete opposite. Tokyo stations have open gates that swing shut on fail. London stations have closed gates that swing open on success.

Also, Tokyo trains have air conditioning, whereas the Underground is so hot and stuffy I'm pretty sure I got brain damage from it. Also^2, Japanese train stations have ads for B2B services, whereas almost every ad in London stations is for a musical. I'm not sure what this means. (Also fondly remember the surprisingly numerous signs at Kings Cross about how you shouldn't assault any train employees, and how teenagers…

London surface trains have aircon, as do many underground lines.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#42

Post by aspenmayer »

lhl wrote: post #22

This is a great writeup and reminded me of some others I've seen in the past. For those interested on the topic, I used Deep Research to generated a report on turnstile/ticketing systems compared to others like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, London, NYC). Also asked it to do research on a few of the other related things like device licensing and the recent NFC-F chip shortages: https://chatgpt.com/share/6828429c-b618-…

> This is a great writeup and reminded me of some others I've seen in the past.

Did you mean it reminded you of others you'd seen on HN or just generally?

I don't know enough about these technologies to speak to the authoritativeness or veracity of gpt output, but I appreciate the gesture.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#43

Post by numpad0 »

TheChaplain wrote: post #14

I love IC cards. They had them on all transport where I live, but a few years ago they changed to QR codes.. Now it's a fiddle with an app, then try to get the right angle on a smudgy reader. Getting onboard takes much longer and it feels like technology sent us 2 steps back instead of forward. IC cards are better, and if they could be integrated in the phone then it would be even better and faster for everyone.

It's about fees and control. Whether it's EMV(Europay Mastercard Visa) or JR East, they take 3% commission on every single sales + realtime sales data for your competitors to abuse. So alternative choices gets occasionally chosen to replace them, I think often as bargaining chips and a backup plan.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#44

Post by kolinko »

astrange wrote: post #37
walthamstow wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the complete opposite. Tokyo stations have open gates that swing shut on fail. London stations have closed gates that swing open on success.

Also, Tokyo trains have air conditioning, whereas the Underground is so hot and stuffy I'm pretty sure I got brain damage from it. Also^2, Japanese train stations have ads for B2B services, whereas almost every ad in London stations is for a musical. I'm not sure what this means. (Also fondly remember the surprisingly numerous signs at Kings Cross about how you shouldn't assault any train employees, and how teenagers…

as for the uk train stations, the temperatures are in part due to their age - London Underground was built in 1870s, and since that time rocks accumulated so much heat that it is extremely difficult to maintain human-friendly temperatures. Japan subway is 70 years younger, so it’s easier for them to maintain temps.

(And my hometown Warsaw subway is even younger - 50 years, and we don’t have AC whilst temperatures are at a perfect level).

What London underground might need is not AC, but a process to cool down rocks - importing coolness during winters. To maintain equilibrum you’d need to pump out around 1TWh heat every year. To bring it down to normal levels in say 20-30 years you’d need to pump out 2-5TWh a year.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#45

Post by brigandish »

PaulHoule wrote: post #4
aecsocket wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The magnitude to which FeliCa was faster shocked me as well when I found out. But it's not like the latency is insignificant: it's obvious how much faster people can get through a Tokyo metro gate than a London one. So clearly it must have some kind of financial impact as well, if an entire city's public transport system works slower because of it. Even ignoring empathy for a second, isn't this the kind of thing that…

It is not just capital but the interpersonal and bureaucratic factors. Technically the way to think about latency is that a process has N serial steps and you can (a) reduce N, (b) run some of those serial steps in parallel, and (c) speed up the steps. For one thing, different aspects of the organization own the N steps. You might have one step that is difficult to improve because of organizational issues and then th…

> On top of that we valorize "slow food" [1] have sayings like "all good things come to those who wait"

Japan has its own versions of these things so I doubt it's this. The whole culture is, in general, not built for efficiency either.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#46

Post by brigandish »

astrange wrote: post #37
walthamstow wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the complete opposite. Tokyo stations have open gates that swing shut on fail. London stations have closed gates that swing open on success.

Also, Tokyo trains have air conditioning, whereas the Underground is so hot and stuffy I'm pretty sure I got brain damage from it. Also^2, Japanese train stations have ads for B2B services, whereas almost every ad in London stations is for a musical. I'm not sure what this means. (Also fondly remember the surprisingly numerous signs at Kings Cross about how you shouldn't assault any train employees, and how teenagers…

Japan's trains have aircon but often it's not cold enough, and at the parts of the year when the climate moves from hot to cold or cold to hot you might find yourself on a train with heating still on because the calendar date is still "winter" even though it's a hot and sunny day, while you sweat profusely and feel irritated about the seemingly widespread inherent inflexibility of the Japanese.

Osaka's Hankyu trains are full of ads for musicals (it owns the Takarazuka Revue), I think that all this shows is that London has a far more vibrant cultural scene, which is apparent at all levels of society. I'd rather see ads for musicals than the ads for male hair removal clinics.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#47

Post by walthamstow »

chgs wrote: post #40
walthamstow wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the complete opposite. Tokyo stations have open gates that swing shut on fail. London stations have closed gates that swing open on success.

At busy times underground gates don’t close, until someone scans the wrong card (which leads to them walking into the barrier and then the person behind walking in, then the barrier opening from the person behinds card and general chaos) And faster throughput would just increase that.

I cycle most of the time to be fair but that doesn't tally at all with my recent experiences of peak Oxford Circus

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#48

Post by BlueTemplar »

astrange wrote: post #35
tkgally wrote: post #28

Long-time Japan resident here. The IC cards do work quickly and smoothly, but the retail payment system overall is a mess because different stores accept different combinations of dozens of electronic payment brands. When shopping, I prefer to use the Suica app in my iPhone as it’s just a quick touch, but some stores won’t accept it so I have to use the Nanaco app—which requires a face recognition step—or pay in cash…

> but the retail payment system overall is a mess because different stores accept different combinations of dozens of electronic payment brands. This is a fun thing to keep in mind when people tell you Japan is a "homogenous society". (It's not high-trust either.)

(What do you mean ?)

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#49

Post by BlueTemplar »

kolinko wrote: post #44
astrange wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, Tokyo trains have air conditioning, whereas the Underground is so hot and stuffy I'm pretty sure I got brain damage from it. Also^2, Japanese train stations have ads for B2B services, whereas almost every ad in London stations is for a musical. I'm not sure what this means. (Also fondly remember the surprisingly numerous signs at Kings Cross about how you shouldn't assault any train employees, and how teenagers…

as for the uk train stations, the temperatures are in part due to their age - London Underground was built in 1870s, and since that time rocks accumulated so much heat that it is extremely difficult to maintain human-friendly temperatures. Japan subway is 70 years younger, so it’s easier for them to maintain temps. (And my hometown Warsaw subway is even younger - 50 years, and we don’t have AC whilst temperatures are…

It's still a ventilation issue rather than directly an age issue : it's the equilibrium that matters at these timescales.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#50

Post by lhl »

aspenmayer wrote: post #42
lhl wrote: post #22

This is a great writeup and reminded me of some others I've seen in the past. For those interested on the topic, I used Deep Research to generated a report on turnstile/ticketing systems compared to others like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, London, NYC). Also asked it to do research on a few of the other related things like device licensing and the recent NFC-F chip shortages: https://chatgpt.com/share/6828429c-b618-…

> This is a great writeup and reminded me of some others I've seen in the past. Did you mean it reminded you of others you'd seen on HN or just generally? I don't know enough about these technologies to speak to the authoritativeness or veracity of gpt output, but I appreciate the gesture.

Well I've seen some other writeups like https://atadistance.net/2020/06/13/transit-gate-evolution-wh... that have also been referenced on HN. Discussions like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38694411 and others that are probably easy to search for.

While some people have a reflexive dislike for AI output, I've done maybe a hundred o3 Deep Research queries now and found the reports to be generally high quality as well sourced as most human generated ones. I shared this one since I think it was a particularly interesting review the various systems around the world (I've personally used all those transit turnstiles personally and am generally familiar w/ RFID/NFC/EMV systems and didn't spot anything egregious).

(I find Deep Research reports to on average be high signal to noise than most of the human tokens being output on sites like HN for example.)

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