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What really stands out is the difference in design philosophy. In London, the gates are normally closed and only open if your Oyster card is valid. In Tokyo, the gates are open by default and only close if your card fails. You don’t have to wait for doors to open and close every time—it just keeps the flow moving and feels way faster.

It's a subtle but very impactful difference. Japanese faregates also typically have two sets of doors, allowing them to close in front of you whichever direction you are moving. So people can go through at a fast pace and very tightly spaced, and the door still closes in front of the correct person.

They also have the display screens located farther ahead so you don't have to stop walking to see how much fare you were charged.

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 situation.

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.)

I fully agree that the base fare + whatever on top type of ticketing system is needlessly complex and confusing. We've almost missed a train because we were not aware we needed to buy base fare separately, and only found out because we asked a station employee for the way to the tracks who then informed us we're missing some tickets.

Same in the Taipei Metro system. Stations often have facilities(like toilets, stores and lockers) within the paid area. However, getting in and out at the same station charges you the base cost: NT$20 (About US$0.66).

For example: You'd explain to the staff that you want to use the toilets, and they'll hand you a plastic NFC token coin, limited to enter and exit at the same station. You use that to enter the paid area, go to the toilet, then deposit the coin in a special slot to exit.

>Gate guards usually hand you a slip that explains the situation at the other gate or when leaving again.

That was done in the past, but it's quite nice that they just hand you a token now.

Alternatively, train stations in the Netherlands have done away with fees for entering and exiting the same station altogether. Toilets within stations often charge a €0,70 fee, though.

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 "neighborhood character") which says that anything made for poor people must be kept old and dirty or else rich people will show up and take it away from them.

I had never noticed it like that but now I’m dead.

When I moved to my current neighborhood I asked why there was no public transportation and someone said it was so poor people couldn’t be around and I hadn’t connected this to the wider culture.

I was talking to someone about some existing bicycle road infrastructure that ran through several neighborhoods, rich and poor, in a large city. They said when it first was built, some people in the rich neighborhood objected because they said criminals would use it to come to their neighborhood. (The city is mostly on a grid, including this neighborhood, making the whole idea absurd anyway.)

I had long ago pointed out to them that much of the bike infrastructure connects wealthy neighborhoods with wealthy neighborhoods.

Yep, it puts the “F U” in fun!

Along the public transit line (ha!), the person primarily in charge of NYC’s road design and public transit planning back in the day made several anti-poor design choices, like ensuring overpasses crossing roads to less-poor (I.e. more-white) areas were just low enough that public busses couldn’t pass under them, as well as planning off-ramps that dumped a majority of the smog-ridden traffic into poorer neighborhoods, and let’s not forget how public parks in poorer neighborhoods had little monkeys adorning the fences. If you’ve ever wondered why a dangerously busy road with little in the way of safety measures for pedestrians cut between a neighborhood and a shopping district, you can thank Robert Moses.

> current neighborhood

Context please? Which country and city?

I assume US, city doesn’t matter since this is the default opinion for most NIMBY suburban Americans in all US cities.

A suburb in southern winter garden, FL.

Japanese transit using society is not all old and middle class: it’s pretty much everyone who is not filthy rich isn’t it?

Old meaning not young. Pretty much all crimes or any other forms of messy behavior worldwide are committed by young men.

But the median age in NYC is 38 and Tokyo is 45. (source: two Google searches I just did). That means a lot!

It's true they don't jump the gates often and they don't have loud panhandlers. Instead the societal transit ills are passed out drunks, suicides and molesters. (Not meaning these actually happen all the time, it's just my impression of what people talk about.)

> it’s pretty much everyone who is not filthy rich isn’t it?

Hmm, it's more about what you're doing, I think? Rich people use transit all the time if it serves their purposes afaik. One thing that helps in Japan is the culture of wearing face masks means you won't be recognized in public. (Obviously this doesn't work if you're like a 7' NBA player.)

For going between cities the trains are actually the nice expensive option, and flying or taking a night bus is cheaper.

But trains are also basically only good at carrying yourself. If you're traveling in a group, or carrying equipment with you, or don't want to walk a lot then you'd still want to drive or take a taxi locally.

> Pretty much all crimes or any other forms of messy behavior worldwide are committed by young men.

Pretty much all?

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while it's not an apples:apples comparison, in contrast, only 5% of American workers commute by public transportation[1], which means >90% commute by car. From this, one can make educated guesses on the socioeconomic status slices that make use of public transit for each respective group - 5% vs 50%

1. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

That’s super interesting data, thank you.

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> 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"

I think the ideology is in the parent comment. I ride lots of public transit and don't hear or see these things. The largest American public transit system, in NYC, certainly isn't seen as a gift other than by New Yorkers to themselves.

FWIW, I've seen American transit systems that let people board without even being asked to pay. I've seen plenty of bus drivers wave through people who couldn't pay. On one bus a teen boarded and walked straight to their seat. The bus driver, in an authoritative parental voice, kept summoning them to the front. There they lectured them: It's ok, but you need to talk to me first.

I didn't see that. All ages, including lots of school kids.

I'm just amazed at how considerate japanese society is.

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Please don't read too much into it. Outside of the peak demand at least here, in Kansai area, gates will close when they sense you approaching to indicate that you actually need to touch the card or insert a ticket. They stay open only if there is a continuous flow of passengers going one after another.

Another interesting fact is that gates' actuators are not super rigid and it's completely possible to force enter not realizing in time your card has failed (you will be approached by station attendant though).

To summarize, culture may play a role but the main differentiator is the high traffic volume.

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.

They went to a stored value card in the last year or so. It's the ugliest one I've seen (big ugly UPC code on the front, I guess maybe for convenience to sell them at retailers outside the transit stations)

You don’t have to wait for the doors to close to be able to scan your ticket in London Underground. The gate will stay open and let you through. It’s a little bit awkward since you have to approach as you scan your ticket leading to your hand lagging behind

Japan has a fascinating environment. It is very uplifting. Japanese citizens do not seem to participate in crime.

I wondered about this and discussed it with an american friend who lived there for a couple decades and whose kids were born there.

He said that they talk about everything in school. They go through scenarios like stealing, and have long discussions in class. They will discuss what happens, how people feel and what is the outcome. so education.

On the other hand, I commented on the nice society with japanese citizens and they have counterpoints, like "japan is too slow to change" and the like.

In Hong Kong the gates are closed but spring into action much more quickly than in London (though a lot of MTR stations have turnstiles still)

They probably needed that delay to hold back users while payment is processed. Japanese gates were likewise shaped as they are, originally, to buy time to read the magnetic tape tickets.

The iOS and Android part was hard to follow, so I'm not sure if the article is wrong or just unclear. All iPhones since iPhone 7 support FeliCa regardless of the phone region. This is incredibly convenient for visitors to Japan.

On the other hand, Android phones only support it if they are Japan-region phones.

All iPhones worldwide since iPhone 8, Japanese iPhones starting from iPhone 7.

Source: I had an iPhone 7, and was friends with one of the engineers who added FeliCa support to the secure enclave. The Japanese 7 was a one-off until the 8 made it ubiquitous.

Oh, nice! I wish you/they could share some war stories from that, but the combination of Apple and smartcard industry NDAs probably make that inadvisable.

I love the technology, but I'm not a fan of the culture of security by obscurity in that industry. What's worst is that it's at this point mostly unnecessary! Modern smart cards largely use standard algorithms and would probably hold up just as well or even better with their details publicly documented.

Also, small nit: Secure element. The secure enclave is Apple's cryptography and key management coprocessor running an L4-based OS; a secure element is a (generally not Apple specific) smartcard-like hardened microcontroller that can be embedded in devices, usually as part of the SoC of a contactless microcontroller.

The secure enclave primarily holds the user's and Apple's keys; the secure element can also hold somebody else's, e.g. payment or IC card issuers'. The latter is (somewhat ironically, given the name) somebody's trusted enclave in an otherwise untrusted device.

I didn't make this clear enough in the article, sorry for the mix-up! Yes, iPhones support Osaifu-Keitai, and it's Android phones which have this problem. I've now updated the article to clarify this.

A writing feedback: After you added the "Clarification" update, you could also have put something like "Update (read below)" in the bold part "NFC-F support is not enough to use your phone as an IC card".

Otherwise, thanks for writing this article, it is very insightful, especially the whole parallel NFC standards development process in the early days of the technology by Japanese companies like Sony.

Yes that is correct.

Patents hold it back on Android. Apple just got themselves a licensing deal that apparently lets them just have it on all phones.

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.

The iPhone is really big in Japan (it's one of the few countries where it has a higher market share than in the US) which probably makes it more worthwhile for Apple

That doesn't make any sense. It's supported on local phones for both iOS and Android. What iOS does that's special is enable FeliCa for all regions globally. It only affects people from outside Japan traveling there.¹

Since it's not free for them, I assume they determined the amount of people in their key demographic that visit Japan was worth providing a stellar experience. Considering 2.7 million Americans visited last year, it was probably a bet that's paying off.

¹ Or, incidentally, people who live there but purchase phones overseas to avoid an obnoxious camera shutter sound forced on at all times.

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.

> I do wonder who it is that has all of these android phones in the US (nearly 40% by the statistics).

I'm guessing it's largely the working class and undocumented immigrants. And probably lots of burner phones?

People who can't afford to spend $599 on a phone. Or those who can afford it but can send picture messages all the same on a phone that costs hundreds less.

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.

I think it's more like difference in commitment to product and sales model between Apple and every other phone manufacturers. Apple really commits deeply into making singular globally unified phones and rejecting pressures to make carrier branded bastard children of iPhone. None of Android phone manufacturers are as committed - even Google - and so unnecessary features gets removed from non-Japanese phones, even the same models were sold globally as well as in Japan(not always the case as Japanese businesspeople generally hate more to think about exports than about lost opportunities and there had historically been obscenely abundant supply of Japan-only electronics).

It's surprising that it can be added back on Pixels, I thought it would use something like factory generated certificates.

It's probably more of a licensing fee thing, just editing the SKU in the deviceinfo partition of a global Pixel suffices to enable Osaifu Keitai. It's the same hardware everywhere, only licensing restrictions.

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. I haven’t bothered to set up a QR code app yet. Twice, when I tried to install PayPay, the most common one, I got stuck on an authentication step and gave up.

Even shops within the same department store accept different combinations of payment systems. In my local Takashimaya, I can use Suica to buy food in the basement but not in the restaurants on the upper floors. Shops in the nearby Sogo Department Store do not accept Suica, only Nanaco, except for the Starbucks on the third floor, which does accept Suica.

Convenience stores seem to accept nearly everything, as you can guess from the number of logos on this sign:

https://news.mynavi.jp/article/osusumecredit-107/images/003l...

Some relatives are arriving in Japan next Tuesday for a three-week visit, and they asked me what they should do about credit cards, digital money, cash, etc. I realized that, despite living here, I barely understood the situation myself, so I had Gemini Deep Research prepare a report for them:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WY4AM0mJS94uwPMK8XjIQMLf...

Another point to add is that in the 1980s and 1990s big security problems emerged with the magnetic cards that were used widely then for transportation and telephone calls. Here is what Perplexity has to say about that:

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/i-want-some-information-in-...

I well remember the “open street markets in urban areas like Shibuya ... known for selling counterfeit cards.”

> Some relatives are arriving in Japan next Tuesday for a three-week visit, and they asked me what they should do about credit cards, digital money, cash, etc.

I've only been to Japan very briefly, but between an international credit card (Visa or Mastercard) and a Suica in Apple Pay, I never had any issues.

Maybe this is due to having been only to very touristy areas, but almost everywhere I had to pay took at least one of the two, and thanks to being able to top up the Suica directly in Apple Wallet from my credit card, running out of a balance there was never an issue.

Of course you'll need some cash for some smaller food stalls and shops, but getting that wasn't any issue either: ATM fees didn't seem particularly high as far as I remember (and my bank reimburses them).

I was fascinated by the sometimes dozens of different contactless (stored value and otherwise) and QR code based payment methods accepted at some stores, but with the exception of a few vending machines (that also took cash), I don't think I've seen any place taking only these but not also either Suica or Visa/Mastercard.

Quite the opposite, actually – ubiquitous ice cream vending machines on train platforms that accept the same card for payment people need to get into the station in the first place seem like a real health hazard :)

I heard you can pay a lot of bills via PayPay, so I wanted to use that too but I haven't been able to beat the authentication boss either.

So so many weird quirks, my latest one is, I cannot withdraw cash from any ATM but a 7/11 ATM with a Seven bank card. All other ATMs just won't accept it anymore...how does one even begin to resolve something like this ?

I found Suica/Pasmo/Icoca to be the golden trinity for most regions.

Those are interchangeable – you can (generally) use Suica if a store accepts Icoca and vice versa, etc.

paypay to setup for QR code is just 2 minutes, and you get lots of bonuses, just have to suffer the trial by fire of your katakana matching your resident card ID name, which, everyone has their own version of.

I tried it said ten days to verify, then it failed...because my name was wrong. Gave up.

> 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.)

When people discuss Japan being a homogeneous society, that typically refers to it being a very ethnically uniform society.

I really, really don't see how that connects to... payment systems. Surely you're not trying to claim that what people actually mean typically is that Japan is homogeneous in every arbitrary way possible, right? That's a bit too much even for a strawman, even if I factor in the kind of forum this is.

> When people discuss Japan being a homogeneous society, that typically refers to it being a very ethnically uniform society.

Even if you ignore tourists that's not really true of Tokyo either. Japan doesn't collect ethnicity statistics though - the numbers for this you may have seen are misreadings of something else.

> Surely you're not trying to claim that what people actually mean typically is that Japan is homogeneous in every arbitrary way possible, right?

That's absolutely what people online think about Japan, they think it's a stuffy collectivist society where everyone agrees with each other and there are no immigrants.

> Even if you ignore tourists that's not really true of Tokyo either. Japan doesn't collect ethnicity statistics though - the numbers for this you may have seen are misreadings of something else.

Which is all very interesting, but remind me, how does this tie into payment systems again?

> That's absolutely what people online think about Japan, they think it's a stuffy collectivist society where everyone agrees with each other

... and then they play the latest Yakuza and wash that down with a few episodes of Tokyo Revengers? It'd would appear that one generalization doesn't beat another.

> and there are no immigrants.

YouTube has been overflowing with thinly veiled grifts lately about how everything in Japan is going to shit right now, and how it's because of the damn tourists and immigrants (heavily peppered with false crime rate figures and false immigration statistics of course).

Still, pretty unrelated to payment systems. I can't shake the feeling that this is the exact same type of conflict sowing one can see under more mainstream topics. Vague mention of something, then a massive tangent, and all of a sudden we're discussing deeply controversial political topics. If you're not doing this with malicious intent, you might be in an unhealthy loop that I'd advise you try quitting. This is not helping anyone, which is what I intended to be my point.

I would say that the common image of Japan is that it's a weird place that only works because it's full of Japanese people.

Whereas I would like to promote the idea that it's a normal place containing normal people (…many of them Chinese tourists, lately), and you can have the good things they have too if you simply copy their policies. Or in other words, there's no need for conflict.

I don't know if payment systems are one of those anymore though. FeliCa is the best because it's so fast, but any kind of tap to pay is IME fine. Certainly better than having to use a ticket machine or buy a special card or work out change to give to the bus driver.

The banking system in Japan is homogeneously terrible ;)

One reason for the success of IC cards as electronic wallets is because what banks offer is so inconvenient.

But really, what works in Japan is cash. You are the odd one for paying electronically.

It is slowly changing though. You can almost go cashless now. 10 years ago, cards were mostly just for withdrawals. 20 years ago, good luck finding an ATM that accepts your card. Personal experience, in 2005, we spent half a day finding one, in Tokyo.

As for being "high trust", it is certainly not as a foreigner, trying to do business in Japan. The "high trust" part is more about petty crime being really low, so you can leave your bag unattended in a café and it will still be there when you get back, in fact, it is a common way of "reserving" a table.

(What do you mean ?)

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.

I think it's about equal for utility - Japanese Suica/Pasmo cards are also usable in every single konbini, at all the stations stores, across most regional transportation and taxis, and at maybe half of Tokyo shops/restaurants (it's a default option in AirPay and other PoS systems). A lot of vending machines accept Suica, and I use it at grocery or drug stores. You can even use it at some other types of shops like Bic Camera, although for high ticket items you're going to hit the Suica balance limits... https://www.jreast.co.jp/multi/en/suicamoney/shop.html

Most, but not all. Wikipedia has a hideously convoluted diagram showing the complex web of interoperability or lack thereof:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_Mutual_Usage_Servic...

The complexity is largely limited to monthly passes at this point, as far as I understand. Per the diagram (and my, very limited, personal experience), stored-value rides are supported across most systems, as there is a shared set of keys and station identifiers.

The funny thing about Japan is they have this wonderful universal IC card, but not everywhere accepts it, some accept only it, some only accept cash, some only cash or physical credit card, some only QR (PayPay), so you end up needing to carry several methods, and one of them is paper and coins!

Variety is good! The fact the USA only has Mastercard and Visa and that they've colluded to keep all other forms of payments out is why their fees aren't lower.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...

Japan has competition in payment systems. Paypay, D-Pay, Meri-pay, Line Pay, Rakuten Pay, etc... Each tries to entice both customers and retailers by offering discounts and bonuses.

Also I'm happy to pay cash as it's private.

USA has Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and AmEx. Each of which try to entice their customers by offering better rewards programs. Though AmEx isn't taken everywhere (notably Costco) and Discover is hit and miss as well.

Japan has all of those as well and about 30 more

It's funny, because the Costco credit card used to be AmEx. IIRC Costco Canada only takes Mastercard, which is funny since the US Costco credit card is Visa, so you can't use the US Costco CC to pay in a Canadian Costco.

You actually can use the Costco US Visa at Canadian Costco, they’ve got a special exemption for it. (And vice-versa, you can use the Canadian Costco Mastercard at American Costco.)

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 to use their card, which is what they would need in order to get any leverage.

The rewards programs are a grift. The price of everything goes up by 3% and if you get a rewards card you get 1-2% of it back, therefore you get one. Then you're still out the other 1-2% you wouldn't have been if the market was competitive, the people who don't get one get punished by being out the entire 3% (which inhibits competitors with lower fees), and Visa and Mastercard suck billions of dollars out of the economy into their Scrooge McDuck money bin because consumers have been defrauded into thinking this arrangement is to their advantage.

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.

This is a great argument for forcing network interop. Akin to net neutrality, allow card companies to transit over the network for reasonable rates. This removes any networks ability to squeeze things like this

It depends where the division is, I guess. It always feels a bit heavy-handed to force private companies to interoperate within their infrastructure. That being said, I don't really know a better way to do it.

Having terminals be more universal would be good, but good luck replacing old ones and convincing entrenched market participants to offer them..

The newer generation of products like BNPL are even worse; they often contractually prevent merchants from charging a surcharge commensurate with the cost of accepting that payment method.

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.

It's amazingly fractured actually. In my home country every store pretty much has the same exact model of a card reader that takes all contacless payments and credit cards with chips. In Japan it's a coinflip wether a credit card reader can take contactless credit cards. And if you do it with the chip, it's always a fun process of the clerk not understanding you need to insert a pin or select a currency, so they sometimes abort the process in confusion.

Needless to say, I prefer to use cash in Japan.

On my shotengai there are many cash only shops and some cashless shops right next to it. I've also seen a lot of shops that are cash except for PayPay (presumably incentivized, or maybe they can support it without additional hardware). While it's a bit annoying, it's still better than the alternative (payment monopolies). The only thing that does irk me a little is that JR stations only support swipe, not touch pay for credit cards. I'm a bit undecided if that's just due to legacy hardware or as a subtle nudge to get people to use Suica instead.

For Japanese payments, what's far worse is that so many shops and chains continue to have point systems that require their own point cards (and even the ones with apps seem to have awful slow UIs, at least on my iPhone).

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.

I don’t know if it’s that surprising. It’s easy to migrate over small markets and the population of Australia is extremely geographically concentrated.

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.

I seem to have managed to live in the only place in Japan where you can’t use suica/pasmo for transport: Tokushima. Still works in convini though.

Tokushima Bus is apparently introducing IC card support next year.

You can even use them at international chains like Starbucks, IKEA, and McDonalds.

Thailand and Malaysia also do this (not sure about IKEA, but definitely McDonalds and konbini, and probably Starbucks too)

In Istanbul I think you can use the transport card to pay in some supermarkets, and of course it works on all transportation modes, including ferries. (As an aside, they also have a QR-code based system specifically for restaurants, which I think is used mainly by companies looking to compensate their workers lunches, but you can also use it in Ininal app to get a discount)

>They are also fast, like you don’t even have to break your strike while passing the turnstiles to enter the metro.

They are not slow, but it's faster in Japan, still. At least in the Taipei MRT.

The Taoyuan Metro is way worse, though. If you keep walking while going through the gate and the card doesn't scan fast enough, it'll error and tell you to step back outside of the gate area (the in-between part) and scan again. It slows traffic down quite a bit.

Technically a gate, not a turnstile (which inherently slows traffic)

>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.

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.

OP is talking about QR codes, not EMV open-loop systems.

Would printing out the QR code and putting it into your wallet work or is it a changing one?

I think the most annoying part is the external QR reader (on faregates?). I've rarely had a good experience with those whether using a QR on paper or from a phone screen.

Printing out the QR code and giving out to all your friends?

I think most QR systems include some sort of rolling timestamp to combat that.

iOS supports ICs fine. It has supported Suica since 2017 when I used it instead of the physical card.

Forcing use of an app and QR codes does seem like a significant step back, although I guess it makes paper tickets much easier to implement with the same scanner.

The IC card companies got too greedy unfortunately - along with phones not supporting NFC-F if they're not designed for the Japanese market, the readers are also expensive. With various subways starting to introduce credit card contactless payment I suspect it's only a matter of time before IC cards go away.

I thought transport companies are the ones doing IC cards? (True for Japanese IC cards, except Pasmo)

> I thought transport companies are the ones doing IC cards?

Well, a number of smaller transport companies are turning away from IC cards citing the cost of the equipment. I don't know at which point in the stack the greed is coming in - whether it's the IC committees, Sony with the underlying technology, some other player or all of them at once - but it's happening. JR East can probably sustain Suica for decades but you'll notice they've been making a hard push into traditional credit cards and banking; they've seen which way the wind is blowing.

Android, however, does not support them at all unfortunately (at least on phones not targeted to the Japanese market).

I’ve read elsewhere in this thread that for Pixel you can flash a Japanese version of the system image and it will enable IC support. Definitely trying it out later.

At least in Japan, they all work from your phone already.

They even work when the phone is off

Is the card stored on the NFC chip? Or are you talking about these NFC-enabled SIM cards?

Never tried it without the sim, so I assume it is stored on the NFC chip, but really have no idea

Unfortunately transit operators are looking to discontinue the use of these IC cards in favour of QR codes as part of a cost saving strategy: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20241015/p2a/00m/0bu/01...

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.

Not only more expensive to produce and recycle, but the gates have to be extremely complex to handle paper tickets (some railway museums in Japan have them cross-cut on display!).

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 they retain it on some lines at least). (Edit: or just make the whoosh! readers work with QR codes! :)

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!

Hmm, I thought you can preload a transit ticket but still need to buy a paper-only Shinkansen seat ticket :thinking:

And yeah, the ticket unstacking feature is really neat! (and probably it’s one of the reasons they want to replace the paper tickets – it’s a pretty complex machine on the inside :-)

That is quite interesting. I took normal-speed medium-distance trains in Taiwan and there are many similarities to Japan. The ticket-checking gates to enter/exit the station are exactly the same models used in Japan. The tickets are similar to the ones used in Japan, but they have a QR Code printed on them and might not be magnetic. Even when you exit the station, the ticket gate will give back your ticket - unlike Japan!

Oh really? The two dmeo videos I just saw of the Japanese system seemed to give back your ticket as soon as you walked through the gate.

The normal ticket gate behavior in Japan is that when you enter, the gate gives you the ticket back so that you can carry it all the way to the exit in order to prove that you traveled that journey. When you go through a ticket gate to exit the station, all Japanese ticket gates to my knowledge will dispose of your ticket.

I’ve retained at least some tickets, somehow. No idea!

I retained approximately one ticket in Japan. It was due to walking through a transfer exit gate at some station of the Tokyo Metro, which lets you walk through a non-fare-paid area to re-enter another station.

I also retained all the Shinkansen seat reservation tickets (特急券) back when I had the old-style JR Pass, where you always had to enter/exit stations with help from the station attendant - and not use automatic ticket gates. I haven't tried the current style of JR Pass (since maybe 2022?), but I imagine that the exit gate would eat your seat reservation ticket, just like if you had bought the ticket in cash.

Hmmm, what if you don’t insert your seat reservation ticket on the exit?

Yes, I believe so. JR East is now planning to fade-out magnetic tickets by using paper QR Code tickets.

That article doesn't say they are.

>It will continue to accept national IC cards such as Suica and Icoca

I hope it lasts, but I'm seeing gates which have QR code readers, IC card readers,and contactless payment readers, which is obviously unsustainable. One or more of these will have to give eventually, and given Japan's tolerance for QR code payments (PayPay is massive) and foreigners' familiarity with contactless it seems like IC is the most likely one to go.

I'd be sad if they do go or get relegated to some app, I love the little mascots.

> I hope it lasts, but I'm seeing gates which have QR code readers, IC card readers,and contactless payment readers, which is obviously unsustainable.

Why is this obvious unsustainable? The IC readers and contactless payment readers are normally built on exactly the same tech, or very similar tech. And they’re pretty much always just a single reader capable handling IC cards and contactless payments locally, with back office processing to manage bookkeeping, and any needed external transaction processing.

TfL in London has been operating paper tickets, contactless and IC card for something like two decades now. The IC system is starting to show its age, but that’s only because the current stored value cards don’t have enough on-board storage to handle the continued growth of TfLs systems, and all the new regions they now operate in. But even if the IC system they have plans to migrate and merge their IC and contactless system into one system that can handle both payment types and provide proper feature parity between them.

I thought contactless is considered too slow? The exit gates are often open and only close when somebody attempts to pass without their IC card/insufficient balance on the IC card, how does this work with contactless?

I feel like they could combine the IC and contactless reader into one bit of hardware with some engineering.

> I feel like they could combine the IC and contactless reader into one bit of hardware with some engineering.

This is the case in the Netherlands. The same readers accept the old OV-chipkaart (stored-value) system and the new OVpay (EMV) system.

Actually, I feel like when the OVpay system was rolled out, the existing OV-chipkaart readers simply got a firmware update, giving them the ability to read EMV cards and phones.

Both of these systems work across all tranit modes and operators in the entire country (and even at a few stations across the German border), and there are various models of reader that are used.

(note: OV = openbaar vervoer = public transport)

They've gotten NFC VISA payWave at least comparably fast as FeliCa by skipping a few checks. It's still not as fast as genuine Suica - look how hard these men force their own fist to stay on the reader like their pay depends on it[1], but Suica advantages are slowly becoming a tougher sell with population and economy going a long way down.

1: A 2021 VISA touch-to-ride demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To5S615UQtU

There are several operators mentioned in the article. One is possibly switching entirely to QR because renewing the IC contract is too expensive.

Some are cutting back to just Suica and Icoca. Some are switching to, or using from the start, tap-and-pay (Visa, EMV, etc.).

they want to replace that for cutting cost, this system is great when in large cities but in rural areas the speed,cost etc is excessive

so there's that, I mean if we can optimize QR code system. the winner obviously would be QR because no need to have an dedicated hardware for this

Yes, IC card would be faster but at what point the difference is matters???

A perfectly aligned QR code, displayed on a bright mobile phone display, can work acceptably fast.

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…

The biggest practical benefit of IC cards is that they are by nature always “armed”, unlike QR codes in apps, and are readable from both sides.

On top of that, due to being able to run mutual authentication and being able to store a trusted balance, they are much more resilient to outages of any backend system. QR code tickets invariably need networking and a central backend.

> 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.

> Since there's no point in generating keys for a device which will not be used in Japan, non-Japan SKUs don't have Osaifu-Keitai functionality. So even if you rooted your phone and had full access to the secure element, if your phone's secure element doesn't have the key, you can't use it as an IC card.

At least in some cases it is sufficient to change the phone SKU id (which requires temporary rooting) to the Japan SKU id to unlock the Osaifu-Keitai functionality on a non-Japan phone. I'm not sure if this means that the secure element had the necessary keys provisioned all along, or just that the Osaifu-Keitai app then provisions it on first use.

I believe it is the case that US (at least) iPhones work as IC cards in Japan

Source - I’m sitting in Kyoto right now having travelled all over Tokyo and then on to Kyoto using only my phone to interact with Japan Rail. Verified with two 16Es and a 12. In fact we were able to add the Suica cards to our phones and charge them fromApplePay while still stateside. That let us skip the Welcome Suica line at Haneda and go straight to the monorail. Highly recommended

A broadly supported tap-to-pay fare system is such an underrated accessibility win for public transit when traveling.

Many tourists already get intimidated by language barriers and inscrutable timetables and transit routes; add tariff complexity (and the chance of getting charged with fare evasion!), and many just end up taking a taxi.

With these stored-value systems, you pretty much don't have to ever worry about doing anything wrong as long as you properly tapped in (and have the necessary cash to top up the card at the exit turnstile if you ended up "overdrafting" your card).

Now the remaining complexity is learning about and getting the card in the first place, and Apple Wallet really does an amazing job there in Japan. Not even having to install an app or create any account is absolutely amazing.

You can now make cards and top up from inside Apple Wallet (even with a non Japanese phone or account)

Yes, it's great! My point is that Apple's implementation solves all these challenges, sorry if that wasn't clear.

Not sure if it's still the case, but last year I could only top up with my AmericanExpress in Apple Wallet. Neither Visa nor MasterCard worked. This was a widespread issue at the time.

FWIW I reloaded the Suica on my iPhone a few times in the past 2-3 weeks using my Apple Card (Mastercard) as the funding source and it worked fine.

I had no issues with either Visa or Mastercard last year, but I believe I went just after that issue was resolved.

Yes, all iPhones and Apple Watches carry the functionality regardless of where you buy them, which has been wonderful for me. The fact that the iOS Wallet app can generate these cards as needed and reload them without a third party app is a cherry on top — so nice to for once get a standardized UI instead of having to deal with some half baked transit service app.

I believe Google is trying to do that with their Wallet/Pay/Wallet app, but I guess it doesn’t support FeliCa yet? They do support some weird card formats, so I guess they have at least some flexibility there – no idea why they can’t add it, too.

If I had to ask “why is it so fast?” I’d turn it around and ask “Why are western systems so slow?” and posit that Western capital has an ideology that throughout matters by latency doesn’t. (As Fred Brooks puts it, “Nine women can have a baby in one month”). As an individual or a customer you perceive latency directly though, and throughout secondarily. So it comes down to empathy or lack thereof.

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 a Western capital ideology is supposed to improve? Some food for thought.

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 the excuses come in... Step 3 takes 2.0 sec, so why bother reducing Step 5 from 0.5 sec to 0.1 sec? On top of that we valorize "slow food" [1] have sayings like "all good things come to those who wait" and tend to think people are morally superior for waiting as opposed to "get you ass out of the line so we can serve other customers quickly" (e.g. truly empathetic, compassionate, etc.)

Maybe the ultimate expression of the American bad attitude is how you have to wait 20 minutes to board a plane because they have a complicated procedure with 9 priority levels and they have to pay somebody to explain that if you are a veteran you are in zone 3 and if you have this credit card from an another airline that this airline acquired you are in zone 5, etc... meanwhile they are paying the flight crew to wait, paying the ground crew to wait, etc. Southwest Airlines used to have a reasonable and optimized boarding scheme but they gave up on it, I guess the revenue from those credit cards is worth too much.

[1] it's a running gag when I go to a McDonalds in a distant city that it takes forever compared to, I dunno, Sweetgreens, even "fast" food isn't fast anymore. When I worked at a BK circa 1988, we cooked burgers ahead of time and stored them in a steam tray for up to ten minutes and then put condiments on them and put them in a box on a heat chute for up to another ten minutes. Whether you ordered a standard or customized burger you'd usually get it quickly, whereas burger restaurants today all cook the beef to order which just plain takes a while, longer than it takes to assemble a burrito at Chipotle.

US govt transportation agency central planners will happily spend billions to bulldoze a neighbourhood for a freeway lane, all to shave a few hypothetical seconds off a car commute, so I don’t think the issue is that US culture isn’t interested in speed, latency, or throughput.

Airline boarding is not the only class system in play. At every level of government, even within transit agencies, transit and its customers are seen as and treated as second class citizens. The idea of investing money, time or energy to shave even scores of minutes off the commute of someone who uses a bus, often seems as if it’s an unthinkable thought in these organizations.

> American bad attitude is how you have to wait 20 minutes to board a plane because they have a complicated procedure with 9 priority levels

The purpose of the many boarding groups is IMHO, to make those in groups > 1 feel as though they're missing out on some perk that they could get if they paid more. It's an intentional class system where some are encouraged to look down on those who paid less, and vice versa. It's good for revenue, bad for people.

I doubt airlines complicate boarding groups to reinforce classes. It is likely all about the bottom line, and nickel and dime-ing you at every opportunity.

I think the point is that creating a class system is one way to maximize revenue. The social aspects of that system - looking down on people in economy, or aspiring to be the people in first class – aren’t necessarily the first order effects, but I suspect they contribute.

Exactly, that's the point. Creating an envy structure in order to increase revenue.

> meanwhile they are paying the flight crew to wait

Most flight attendant and pilot union contracts only pay them based on the hours with the door closed or in flight. (This is changing, but it's how it's been for a long time.) This reduces the incentives for quick boarding, as most of the flight crew is not being paid for that time.

> 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.

> 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.

Unlikely, most cities transport systems will run into issues with capacity long before they run into issues with ticket gate latency. No point getting people through the gates faster if they’re just gonna pile up on the platform and cause a crush hazard.

At peak hours in London, the inbound gates are often closed periodically to prevent crowding issues in major stations. If you look at normal TfL stations you’ll notice there’s normally a 2:1 ratio of infrastructure for people leaving a station vs entering. Because crowding is by far the biggest most dangerous risk in a major metro system, and also the biggest bottleneck.

The departure times dominate latency and throughput in metros. The gates are not the bottleneck.

When a full train empties out at a specific station you can get massive delays. Euston platforms 8-11 come to mind. Two arrivals of 600+ people (including standing) trains in a minute or so in say 8 and 11 can cause chaos.

It depends. Usually you'd be right, but for some big events, the stations and platforms can be incredibly packed. In those cases the extra delay from gates could really hurt. One example is Comiket, where you have thousands of attendees all coming to the same few stations around the venue. Both times I was there, there was a massive crowd spanning from the platform to the outside. Having to wait the extra few hundred milliseconds on each card tap would have been painful.

Here's an example video to show the gates in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YffjxN3KsD4

ref: https://twitter.com/sigeyosiinoue/status/891206258488885248

Another angle: mass transit is seen at best as a cost center in the west, when it's more expected to be a fully profitable business in Japan [0]

Paris adopted an IC system as well and it is pretty usable, but not pushed to the extremes of the JR system because they weren't ready to invest as much, manage the money aspect and really make it a full blown business.

[0] some lines and areas are definitely money pits. That's where some companies bail out of the IC system altogether for instance, or go with a different, incompatible but cheaper implementation.

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 than expecting them to pay their way. (Indeed a lot of the penny-wise pound-foolish decisions we see in western public transport are driven by an insistence on cutting costs at all, well, costs).

Or the Hong Kong model. Railway operators are also property developers whose main profits comes from selling homes next to important stations. (This is not necessarily a good thing)

What exactly is wrong with said approach? My guesses are sprawl promotion and attendantly encouraging elimination of green spaces more than normal for developers?

Cronyism, in general. Government pushing for policies favouring railways and cutting bus routes while being the biggest shareholder of the railway company.

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+ yens, you'll only get the base 440 yens from your company.

On profitability, as mentioned by sister comment, they all have a realtor arm and also rent the space surrounding the stations to shopping malls and department stores, sometimes own or revenue share with the attractions in the town that will bring more visitors and they'll talk with he city planners to foster a whole ecosystem, JR famously gets a cut from every Suica transaction etc.

They don't need to make it all from the ride ticket, even if it's price appropriately. 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.

> 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.

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

Paying for commute is mostly a tax thing. It's the same kind of adjustement as doing BYOD or giving employees PCs that have passed their business depreciation value instead of doing leases.

It's way easier to do with train transit, as train companies will give traceability/limitations on the commute and it's way easier to explain that just paying for a week's worth of gasoline or a car's insurance, or other costs.

If a country doesn't have any arrangement to make these expenses easier to pass on the company, I see how commute would just be cover privately by the employee.

> "private" railway companies were set up with immensely valuable government funded capital assets and would never have been able to operate without them,

Fundamentally no business of significant size operates without any gov. oversight nor preferential treatment. Tim Cook shaking Trump's hand is not the outlier, and at the size of a railroad company you better be in good terms with regulators if you want anything done.

> 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

Could you clarify this? To my knowledge only 2 things that could qualify as incentive exist:

- commuting allowances are not considered taxable income for employee

- commuting allowance could be used to reduce tax base for the business

But this is not something I'd call 'heavily'.

My understanding is that commute is universally covered as this is an expected job benefit in Japan, and commuting by car is disencouraged in cities due to the increased insurance liability (as commuting time could be considered work time and injuries incurred to 3rd party will expose the company to liability as well).

> To my knowledge only 2 things that could qualify as incentive exist:

> - commuting allowances are not considered taxable income for employee

> - commuting allowance could be used to reduce tax base for the business

> But this is not something I'd call 'heavily'.

They do both those things, so commute costs are a free tax discount. But they also just tell companies directly that they want them to act in a certain way, and the companies generally fall into line. While the zaibatsu have nominally disappeared, there are still very close ties between the politicians and big businesses in Japan.

When it comes to ticket gate line in a public transport system, latency and throughput are basically the same thing.

There is no practical way to increase the throughput of ticket line, without reducing latency. It’s not like you can install more gates in most stations, the station isn’t big enough, and you can’t make the gates smaller because the people aren’t small enough.

Every transit system measures and has throughput requirements that their gates need to meet. That inherently means latency requirements, because one gate can’t process multiple people in parallel!

Also western systems aren’t that slow. The videos in the article are a decade out of date and show people in London using paper tickets! And almost nobody using a contactless card or Oyster card.

In London the Oyster cards are very fast. Fast enough that a brisk walking pace the gates will be completely open by the time you reach them, assuming you put your card on the reader the moment it’s within comfortable reach.

Contactless payments on the other hand are slower. But there’s not much TfL can do there. The slower speed is entirely the result of the contactless cards taking longer to process the transaction. TfL track contactless cards latencies by bank and card manufacture. There’s a non-trivial difference in latency between different card manufactures and bank configurations. But that’s not something TfL can control themselves.

Indeed. But the primary problem with western transit gates/turnstiles is this:

Japanese IC transaction: Less than 100 ms.

EMV IC transaction: Hundreds of milliseconds.

The person in front of you in the New York subway only realizing that they might have to look for their phone or card in their bag as they're already blocking one of very few turnstiles, and your train is arriving: Timeless.

This is perhaps more of a ‘New York’ problem (i.e. high passenger volume + small stations + slow turnstiles).

In the Netherlands, there are cases where this can happen too (notably, Amsterdam South station), but generally there are less passengers and/or bigger stations (= more fare gates).

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/35qeaOD7haw/maxresdefault.jpg

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 obvious when you can pass through.

Then factor in lots of tourists/visitors (who aren’t used to this system) + aforementioned small stations.

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.

MetroCard was definitely a confounding factor too, but isn’t it still the case that you have to manually push the turnstile within a certain time frame?

(idk, maybe I was just a clueless tourist who didn’t know how it worked :P)

To your latter point, perhaps the MTA should work together with Apple and Google to improve the experience.

The article suggests a reason:

> Places like Hong Kong and Tokyo have a lot of commuters, leading to a lot of congestion around station gates.

However I think it's actually _population density_ that's the critical factor. The investment in new payment technologies is much more likely to pay off in these environments than in the US.

> throughout matters but latency doesn’t

Governments who think this set speed limits on roads to 45 mph, since that's the speed where most cars pass per second on a busy road.

Those same governments then act all surprised when it turns out their whole population is depressed and overworked when they work a 9 hour workday, commute 1.5 hours each way, and have no free time for life, relationships, hobbies, etc.

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 works under 10ms. Although I cant seem to find any reference of it.

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. So we can do Membership card, discount card and payment card all in one. And hopefully someday we could have electronics receipt right on our phone alongside the payment record as well. Something I wished Apple have done for the past 10 years but they still haven't gotten Apple Card or Apple Cash to work outside of US.

> 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).

I think I must be mis-understanding something

> Since there's no point in generating keys for a device which will not be used in Japan, non-Japan SKUs don't have Osaifu-Keitai functionality.

AFAIK, all iPhones from all regions since like iPhone 10 (internet says iPhone 7) support Osaifu-Kaitai unless I don't understand what that means. My USA iPhones works everywhere Suika, Pasmo, Icoca, etc work. Every station, bus, vending machine, convenience store, super market, restaurant, and retail store that accept these forms of payment, they all just work.

Given that all of this works, what is it I'm missing?

Author here, this is my fault for not proof reading this part properly! The part about non-Japan SKUs is generally true for Android phone manufacturers, but Apple eats the cost and gives all phones Osaifi-Keitai. You do not need to root an iPhone to get this functionality, even on a non-Japan unit.

I will write a correction for this section to clear up the confusion.

Author of the "Osaifu-Keitai-Google-Pixel" article here.

There's a big chance that Apple does not eat the cost for Osaifu-Keitai actually, as they may have a sweet-heart deal, hinted by an article from watch.impress [1], which I found a very long time ago via Twitter.

So the fee is either waived by FeliCa networks, covered by Japanese Carriers, and (as an educated guess) paid only upon enrollment of the first FeliCa-compatible card to device.

I think it would be naive to believe that Apple, of all companies, would be the one willing to pay a couple of cents per device in order to offer a feature that, at best, only a single digit percentage of their users would use.

[1] https://www.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/series/suzukij/1297656....

AFAI, many Android phones have Osaifu-Kaitai support outside of the US just sitting there. I think if there is a key generation fee, it's at setup time of a wallet and not just physical phone's existence.

I rooted my US model Pixel 9 Pro on my Japan trip last year to enable it. :D Literally a boolean in a config file.

https://github.com/kormax/osaifu-keitai-google-pixel

(The author's write up has more theories on why Google blocks it on non-Japan SKUs)

This is an interesting find and the author's ideas make sense to me. I can't confirm them of course, this is all probably hidden behind legal documents, but I've updated the article to a link with this repo. Thanks for the link!

Apple is the exception here. What's missing for all other phones not targeted to the Japanese market are the agreements between any non-Apple device manufacturer and the Japanese IC card issuers (JR East for Suica etc.)

Since these cards actually "store money offline", the symmetric keys involved are really not something the issuers ever want to see leaked, so I assume it's not only a question of money (i.e. licensing fees), but also trust in the security posture of the secure element of the phone (if it even has one; many Android phones don't).

Also my western Google pixel pro 9XL does not support it..while the Japanese version does. I guess google might be saving on the licensing or something.

If you want to root your Pixel to enable it:

https://github.com/kormax/osaifu-keitai-google-pixel

It's iPhone 8 and SE 2 onwards. iPhone 7 was the first but they had to be the Japanese special. Non-Japanese 7(at least the early batches of) and SE 1 don't support Suica payments.

iPhones yes, Android no. Most Android devices sold outside of Japan can’t use FeliCa so you have to get the Japan model for osaifu-keitai stuff

"what makes Japan's transit card system (IC cards) so unique compared to the West"

Actually other western transit system cards are similar to Japan's. For example in Paris the transit passes (Navigo cards) are stored-value systems and hold a record of the last few scans (three I think). You can also read them with any NFC smartphone and see what's stored inside. The tap at the entrance of a transit vehicle is near instant as the reader doesn't need to interact with a backend since everything is stored on the card itself.

Yea but the Japanese IC card system has complete interop between all transit systems run by completely different private companies. So you can hop on a train from one city to another and then hop on a bus in that new city on the other side of the country all using the same card.

And a good chunk of vending machines in Japan accept the IC card. Sometimes even food shops a step above vending machines.

Japan has lots of IC cards in various regions, and they have spent a lot of effort integrating their system. Unfortunately some IC cards like Kumamon decided to opt-out due to high maintenance fees.

AFAIK, you can go through up to 4 different company networks once you enter paid-area. Beyond that, you'll need to do the override settlement (乗り越し精算) with the help of station staff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_Mutual_Usage_Servic...

I really wish China would go the IC approach rather than the QR code approach. Just tapping my phone in Tokyo was much easier than getting into Alipay and bringing up the QR code for metro use. Well, still better than the Seattle which still doesn’t support iPhone transit pay.

Suica has a pretty large sensing distance (85mm). So it can "power up" the card at a distance before getting close to the reader.

To avoid large touch area causing accidental touches, places like vending machine requires you to keep your card within sensing area for up to 1 second before completing the transaction.

reference: https://www.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/series/suzukij/1316685....

Speed test between magnetic ticket / IC Card / Credit Card https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAQM5NNnCi4

> When I first read about the fact that the card stores its value on itself

Buried the lede in case anyone missed it.

When you cut out the network and are working with essentially exact amount cash, things can be processed fast.

I could use my European smartphone (well, smartwatch) as an IC card in Japan. I don't think it was slower.

If you're alluding to an Apple watch, it has Felica support wherever you buy it.

PS: For anyone in doubt https://atadistance.net/2017/09/12/iphone-x-keynote-global-f...

It also works on iPhone, with built in wallet support for Suica.

It depends on the vendor and whether they are willing to pay for global licensing. For Garmin devices for example, only the APAC version have NFC-F support.

I wonder whether it is possible to make a fake card that generates a new key / ID / whatever on each use.

If so, this would completely break the offline part of the system. You couldn't rely on hotlists of known-hacked cards any more, you'd need to check each (new) card with a central system to see if its key was ever actually issued to anybody.

This is assuming there's an actual list of currently issued keys anywhere, if such a list doesn't exist, the whole system would be done for.

The fact that some smartphones can emulate NFC-F doesn't help either. If a hacking technique is ever discovered, we can get from the system being fully secure, to anybody being able to issue themselves undetectable cards for any amount, in the matter of days.

With counterfeit physical cards, you can at least try to shut down manufacturers and issue long prison sentences to the dealers selling them on the black market. The criminal activity has to happen in the country where the cards are used by definition, so that country can bring its law enforcement to bear. If all you have is an Android apk and some source code released by three guys in Russia, there's very little you can do.

If such a system were designed in the 2020s, you could establish a CA-like system, where each card's key must be signed by a chain of certificates. This way, thoroughly hacking just one card wouldn't help, as its key could easily be revoked, and you couldn't issue new ones without hacking the (presumably airgapped) card manufacturing systems that contain the signing keys. I don't think a system from the late '80s does this, though.

I've recently returned from a trip across the country and liked everything about my (physical) ICOCA card, except that the machines used to charge it, at least the ones I've found, only accepted cash.

After charging it once with a decent balance though, I got away (almost) entirely without cash using it in combination with a virtual credit card via NFC, save for street food carts and Gachapon machines.

There are charging machines that accept cash cards / debit cards, but only those issued by Japanese banks. So cash is the only option for touristists. You can go completely cash-less if you can use mobile Suica / ICOCA, which let's you charge your phone with Apple Pay / Google Pay (with osaifu-keitai).

I did think it was kind of funny when I’d use a single machine to withdraw cash from my bank account and then deposit the cash right back in to load it onto my IC card.

I'm not sure about the speed argument. My city uses stored-value cards based on Mifare Classic and Mifare Plus (depending on the type of the ticket). If you live here and use the public transit with any regularity, you don't stop when you're going through the turnstile. The card validation isn't instant by any means, but it takes just enough time that you can plop your card on the reader as soon as you can reach it and keep walking, and it'll be done by the time you need to rotate the thingy that's in your way. On most stations, the bottleneck isn't the turnstiles, it's the escalators.

On the security side, yeah, someone did exploit those Mifare key extraction vulnerabilities and make an app to clone cards and restore dumps. The system collates all data every night so if you mess with your ticket, it'll get banned. So you're getting one day of free rides at most, and forfeit the remaining balance and the cost of the card itself.

Since all Pixel phones have the FeliCa build in, I would have loved for GrapheneOS to just enable that in their builds for all phones. It would have been one patch to a library call, so that it always returns true. But I found an issue where the team sadly dicided against it :( I still loved the system when visiting Japan and would wish that Germany had something alike.

> “The London Underground gates don't work nearly as quick with Google Pay or any of my other contactless cards - what gives?”

They used to (and still do?) work faster with the Oyster fare card. Virtually instant. But paying with EMV cards/devices does add a noticable transaction latency before the gate opens. A few hundred milliseconds, I’d say.

That's because for EMV, they need to run asymmetric card authentication algorithms, which unfortunately exclusively use RSA. That's just not very fast to do on the type of microcontroller common in these cards.

EMV also uses faster symmetric cryptography between the card and the issuer, but the latter is not in the picture in a transit gate transaction – too much latency – so asymmetric cryptography it is.

That's also the reason some (mostly older, mostly international) cards don't work with TfL: Some don't even have the coprocessor (or just additional processing power these days, I suspect) required for RSA to cut cost, and only work for online payment transactions.

Is nfc via google/apple wallet faster then?

Apple Pay uses hardware secure elements, so the same limitations largely apply.

Google Pay emulates the card on the application processor, so theoretically it could be faster, but I wouldn't be surprised if anything won in terms of more performant RSA cryptography is lost to higher command processing latency between the NFC interface and application processor.

It would be interesting for somebody to do a latency comparison between Apple Pay, Google Pay, and a physical card!

Doesn't Google Pay offload some of the processing to their cloud?

Google Pay only allows a certain number of offline transactions (around three or so, I think) before I'm required to turn off airplane mode and authenticate with their servers.

I believe this also allows it to work with more phones, and get around security and possibly also regulatory requirements, since there's less need for a really secure secure enclave on NFC devices.

> Doesn't Google Pay offload some of the processing to their cloud?

Not on a per transaction basis, or you couldn't make any offline payments (i.e. with your phone being offline; the terminal can usually not be offline for Apple or Google Pay in the way that it can for cards). Latency would probably also be too high/variable.

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 reader to be internet connected, but such an internet connection is not on the critical path.) From my Apple Watch there is even no need to press any button to activate (unlike Apple Pay EMV transactions): just hold the watch next to the reader and it works. They are weirder than other public transport payment systems like Chicago CTA or NYC MTA, and are also more wonderful.

The DC Metro system operates similarly.

> [...] conflict avoidance - a reader can detect when it's reading more than 1 FeliCa card at a time, and prevent any reading if so [...]

That must be one of the things that ISO 14443 has improved on then, compared to FeliCa:

At least 14443-A (and I believe also B) allows addressing each card in the field individually by its serial number, and then selectively "halt" or resume it. Practically, this means that the reader can talk to cards one by one until it finds the one it's interested in (if any).

Unfortunately I don't know any practical system making use of that (it could get pretty confusing with payment cards, for example – charging a random card of several possible ones sounds like an anti-feature), but I still find it very neat.

One problem with fast writing is that it requres more energy to transmit from reader to a card in order for a card that has no internal source of power, to toggle bits. It is harder compared to just reading a bit from a card. Additonaly it is tricky to implement trasaction with single write, given that data transfer can be interrupted (for example user removes card from RF field). I am not sure if single write is enough for making this robust/transactional. It also helps a lot if RFID antenna is well tuned. Proximity of metal and way it is mounted has a big impact, so it is important that RF antenna for reader is tuned for exact environment it is mounted in.

> One problem with fast writing is that it requres more energy to transmit from reader to a card in order for a card that has no internal source of power, to toggle bits.

Contactless cards manage to boot up a JVM and run bytecode with the energy provided by the field, and many also run RSA with fairly large keys. I doubt that toggling some bits in an EEPROM factors in too much.

> I am not sure if single write is enough for making this robust/transactional.

Transactions are usually implemented via some form of two-phase commit, I believe, to support what's called "tear resistance". If the transaction is incomplete, the reader tells you and you just tap the same card at the same gate again.

Not sure about the implementation, but the feature is supported by all contactless stored-value cards I'm aware of.

I just got back from Japan. I did not notice a difference in performance between tapping with a Blink credit card and tapping with an IC card. I only used the ICOCA card. There were never lines at the gates. There were only ever brief lines at the ticket counters and terminals. I was there during golden week, which is one of the busiest travel times of the year. My travel partner and I used almost exclusively public transportation to get around, usually riding a few trains per-day. We only experienced one two-minute delay in Tokyo on a Friday evening during rush hour.

Japan's transportation infrastructure is great!

>I just got back from Japan. I did not notice a difference in performance between tapping with a Blink credit card and tapping with an IC card. I only used the ICOCA card.

Unless things have changed, the ICOCA uses Felica as well. And old Offline Credit Card transactions used to be 200-300ms. Compared to Felica that is sub 100ms. May be offline transactions for credit card have gotten faster? Or may be not latency sensitive enough to notice the lag.

The public transport cards here in Paris also use NFC. This means you can use your phone to recharge them, or use your phone directly to access the subway network. As far as speed goes, your card/phone is detected pretty much instantly when you tap it on the sensor, at least when the gate isn't broken.

The only time I ever had to wait in line to get into the station was after a stadium event, which is understandable. Rest of the time, you can pass the gates almost without stopping.

In India, The NCMC cards for transit use the same technology. They considered allowing people to use their normal bank issued cards like the public transit in Singapore and decided against it because of potential fraud issues.

Right now, some ncmc card issuers allow validating the card using your phone so you don't have to go to the kiosk after topping up and they are working on letting people use their phones.

Referring to the Osaifu-Keitai part of the article:

> A lot of this is thanks to FelicaDude (Reddit, Twitter), an anonymous internet stranger who disappeared a few years ago but seems to have a lot of knowledge about how FeliCa works. I can't verify any of this information, but it makes sense to me; and anyway, there's no way someone would lie on the internet, right?

Late to the party. These cards are stored-value ones. And they seem to be very secure.

Does this mean that the offline digital cash problem has been solved, as far as in-person customer to merchant payment system goes?

You can trust an arbitrary person giving you money through the card just as well as if they gave you cash. Could you turn this into a pay-anyone-money using cards and card readers?

The whole system is quite tightly controlled by the transit companies (e.g. JR East). For example, your average payment terminal can take money off of a card but not load money onto it (refunds have to be done out of band). Loading money onto cards is more privileged, as it’s equivalent to printing money.

One other limitation in place is that these transit cards have a limit of ¥20,000 (~140 USD) max that can be loaded on to them. So any transaction larger than that is out of the question.

So to answer your question, no this isn’t really a person-to-person cash replacement. It’s a transit card that happens to be able to be used as an offline payment method, but it’s got various limitations and weirdness that prevent it from being something more.

I am not saying this particular system is good enough for person-to-person cash. But..

The primary problems that digital cash has to solve is double-spending. Debit/credit cards solve this problem by confirming the transaction with the central server over the internet. Credits cards used to solve this problem by trusting that someone's signature could not be replicated, but this was obviously insecure. Some cryptocurrencies solve this problem by confirming transactions with a public distributed ledger.

This system is solving the double-spend problem preventing the holder of the card from, as per OP,

> cloning (can't read the keys)

> a successful attack on another card (each card has its own keys)

> replay attacks (per-session unique keys are generated in the challenge/response)

So the secure enclave on these cards prevent double-spend.

However, it seems like the card reading machine has to be trusted in the current implementation, because it can extract an arbitrary amount of cash from your card. This prevents arbitrary peer-to-peer transactions. But this seems like a much easier problem to solve.

> 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.

Just visiting Japan, just realised that IC cards are super fast compared to London, crazy relevant article!

They’re definitely faster, which is nice and surely preferable…

But the London Underground gates are fast enough, with enough space from the reader to the gate, that if you’re ready (and the gate isn’t congested) there’s no need to slow down even from a very brisk walk to pass through.

I haven’t noticed any delay in london with a card, phone might be 200ms slower than credit catd. I Haven’t been to japan for a decade, are they really that much faster - and does it make a difference? What happens if a card is wrong/doesn’t scan/is invalid/etc at the higher speed?

> are they really that much faster - and does it make a difference?

Yes and yes

> What happens if a card is wrong/doesn’t scan/is invalid/etc at the higher speed?

Then the fare gates close in time to stop that person and the next 3 or so people behind them get annoyed and go around.

Felica is virtually instant. Even faster than the original Oyster in London (which contactless card or phone is much slower than)

I'm currently on a japan train - using a suica card is essentially instantaneous. if the cards are declined for any reason the gates swing shut immediately, if that's what you're asking.

I don’t see how that’s any different to the underground

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 weren't allowed to buy matcha drinks because they have too much caffeine.)

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.

Well, London obviously does have one of (the most?) vibrant cultural scenes in the world.

(Last time I was there I saw a singer from Mali, which I thought was interesting mostly because all of her backing visuals were StableDiffusion AI art and I don't know if anyone else noticed.)

But it's also the capital of a country that should have an industrial economy and increasing doesn't have one anymore, because they've decided it's all sort of beneath them.

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.

What does that mean, “rocks accumulate heat”? Should be an even cool temp down there, as long as tunnels aren’t too deep. A few vents to allow hot air to rise should work, no?

The ambient temperature of the clay earth around the tunnels has been rising since the tube was built

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_cooling#Sou...

More input than output in assuming and vents were probably not built back in the day.

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

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

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

In japan it's optimized for speed thanks to the IC working so fast so you are only slowed down if something fails. It rarely fails (if you're not a tourist...) so you see people walking through them pretty quickly and I have seen people run into each other because they assumed the next person was gonna go through.

The speed difference isn't in not phone vs. credit card, it's credit card vs. stored value card.

Stored value cards are optimized for speed and cost, and as a result have shared symmetric keys available in both card and reader. That enables extremely fast transactions.

EMV cards are (also) optimized (at least in the offline case, which transit gates use – the latency to talk to the bank backend would be too high) for security. The security model doesn't trust readers to keep keys secret, which means you need asymmetric cryptography for card authentication. The specs are old, which means RSA – which is very slow to run in cheap ICs embedded in these cards produced at scale.

It matters because you don’t have to interrupt your stride. You don’t tap the card, you kinda just hold it and walk through at full speed.

If the protocol is designed well, high speed doesn’t mean high error rate either.

I can’t rule out that at rush hour in either country it makes a difference, because I haven’t experienced it.

But I’m with you, with an express travel card set in Apple Pay (so you can just plop your phone down on the reader without opening anything) there is a beat for it to read on the Underground barriers, but it’s basically the same length of time as it takes to do the step and a half from the reader to the gate. At a normal walking speed I don’t feel as though I need to interrupt my stride.

They are OK. I find Sydney ones more reliably tap, plus you can use just a credit card to tap, as well as use a credit card to buy the Opal card. You can buy the opal card at 100s of places not just train stations. The actual transport itself is better in Tokyo tho.

I like how in Sydney you can just tap on and tap off (in a lot of situation) without a gate. Like the light rail, you don't have to have all the pressure of getting through a gate with 100 people behind you like in Tokyo.

When your card fails in Tokyo, it's such a stressful event, and you have to do that "huff, turn around & stomp off" thing everyone does...

NYC subway tap-to-pay via Apple Pay is also instant. Like, actually, instant (<500ms)

Can't they protect the stored value in the card against manipulation by way of digital signature? Or does this not make sense because then readers controlled by 3rd parties would have the private key.

Not mentioned is the cards currently in use in Japan, "icoca". A pun on "ikouka" - "shall we go?"

As in, "will this train run?"?

Do not think so. That would be a different verb form -rareru

It is so strange to think that there are places where the trains have gates that close if you can't pay your fare somehow. I've never lived in such a place.

The light rail here in Phoenix was established in 2008. Since then it's been on an "honor system" fare payment regime. There are bright orange lines painted on the ground and you must not cross the line until you've paid your fare! Then, in the station or on the train, you may be approached by a Fare Inspector (these are specialized jobs) who wears blue and wields an electronic scanner box.

If you haven't paid your fare then you may receive a warning, and you're usually expelled at the next station. Personally, I've never seen anyone receive more than a verbal warning, such as a citation or a police visit.

Recently the entire transit system underwent "fare modernization" and now most riders are on the mobile app or an NFC card. The app uses QR codes only, much to my chagrin. The little kiosks that are supposed to scan QRs are very, very reluctant to accept mine, for some reason.

Therefore it may take me 30 seconds up to 4-5 minutes before the kiosk beeps green and takes my fare. (The fare is prepaid in an account, but scanning/tapping will deduct it from that account and acknowledge your presence in the station/bus.)

It is 100% operator discretion whether you can board a bus. So every time I try with my mobile app, there is a rigmarole where the operator shares their favorite troubleshooting steps for scanning (which never work because it's not my fault) and then they wave me aboard, whether paid or not. Because the other passengers hate waiting behind a dude who's fiddling with his phone.

I often see passengers just walk into a train station without tapping/scanning. I have no idea how they do that. I think they're just not bothering to pay their fare. But again, we don't have gates or turnstiles, only some menacing orange lines on the ground, and we're all still on the "honor system", so anything goes.

Honestly it does not seem to me like the stations could be redesigned to have any sort of barrier gates. People would just jaywalk and cross the tracks anyway. I suppose the taxpayer subsidies are so significant that they don't really care about collecting all the fares they could.

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.

Have you ever considered eliminating gates from public transport entirely, as is done in Vienna?

No they aren't weird. It is a very simple system that doesn't try to destroy the customer.

weird (positive)

Japan's IC cards ARE weird and wonderful, a reason I have missed Japan (after only living there three months whilst working for my US-based employer) ever since the day I returned to this cesspit over two years ago.

[dead]

I don't understand -- we are talking about 100ms or so of latency? which is almost completely dwarfed by any mechanical action such as the gates actually opening?? This is about as ridiculous as it gets. The videos that compare the UK system with the JP system practically show the same throughput, even when in the UK video most people are using magnetic/paper tickets (which by necessity are going to be much slower than NFC).

In addition, the annoyance of these gates comes from having to fiddle with the wallet, etc. in order to find the card or the phone, or the fact that multiples tries may be required for the reader to actually read it; not the 200ms it takes for the reader to do so. I'm going to bet that faster NFC bandwidth makes the entire thing even more finicky, not less.

If you really want to speed how people go through the gates, then _remove the damn gates_. It's not rocket science, and there are some European cities that have _no_ gates in their underground systems. München comes to mind, but even in London less central stations have no gates. Beat that.

In addition , the article bashes NXP for using obscurity as a defense, then goes to praise Felica, whose apparently main barrier of defense is:

> the crypto is proprietary, and probably buried underneath a mountain of NDAs, so the public can't audit it independently.

This is literally the definition of security by obscurity. When I read the two examples set by the author, my only possible conclusion is that security by obscurity actually works, but only when you can keep it actually obscure. The only problem is that NXP failed to keep their algorithms obscure while apparently FeliCa did. It is basically the opposite conclusion to what the author is trying to convince me to believe. I find it totally unjustified to blame NXP for trying to keep the algorithm obscure by the courts when apparently FeliCa also does it -- just much more successfully.

Note: I personally consider MIFARE classic being _almost_ trivially clonable a requirement.

Many gates in Japan are open by default, and close if they detect someone trying to go through without tapping/inserting ticket/incorrect ticket. I'm not sure why it's not all of them though. But the whole system is built for speed/throughput. Smaller stations outside the cities don't have gates

Bi-directional gates are always open by default. One-way gate would close after a certain time to prevent people coming from the wrong side.

Maybe because I started my public transportation life in Japan I prefer gates to no gates

(1) it means people pay for usage. Someone going 20km pays more than someone going 1km since they have proof where you entered.

(2) it prevents more accidents/fines? - I had this happen to me in Paris, maybe because I was used to Japan. I was going to Paris Disneyland. I wrongly assumed I couldn't get there without going through a gate. I got on the subway, followed the signs in the tunnels to some train in Châtelet les Halles, was on the train, showed up at Paris Disneyland, was told I had to pay a 3x fine for not having the correct ticket. Or I could get on the train, go back to Paris, get the correct ticket, then come back (2hrs?) In Japan, for the most part, I couldn't have gotten on the train without a ticket and if I did go further than I paid can just adjust my fare at the end. No fines needed or imposed.

I find this a very thin argument, even thinner than the one coming from the authorities claiming rampant ticket fraud. I travel by train a shitton through all of Europe, and I have _never_ had the issue of boarding a train without knowing if I had a valid ticket for it. And even in the cities w/o gates there is some expectation that you will have to validate the ticket somewhere, at your leisure. Do you ever board street trams, for example?

For the record, I am French. I used to be proud that nothing physical prevented you from boarding a train you had no ticket for. But, IMHO sadly, people like me have lost, because now trains also have ticket gates in France, which means that I:

A) No longer can accompany my ailing relatives to their train seats if I don't have a ticket myself (/as I could twenty years ago)

B) No longer can board the train when all my hands are full with luggage (since I need a free hand to search for the ticket in my wallet/bags to go through the damn machine).

> I travel by train a shitton through all of Europe, and I have _never_ had the issue of boarding a train without knowing if I had a valid ticket for it.

Like I said, I was used to Japan. I couldn't have boarded a train without passing through a gate for which I would have needed a ticket. As pointed out above, that happened in Paris. At no point between the metro and the train was their any barrier preventing me from getting on the train without a ticket. Just a tunnel with labels directly to the train. Being used to Japan, I assumed therefore I could work out out at my destination since there wasn't even a ticket purchasing place that I would notice, between those 2 spots.

You need to remember, people who have not used your system (tourists) will have to make every mistake possible. I prefer a system that allows less mistakes as well as a system that lets me fix my mistake. You seem to prefer systems that require you to make a mistake once and get fined, and then learn how to use the system from the mistake.

Yes, slowing down native users of public transportation because of tourists is a big, popular movement in places like Paris. /s

To transform your argument: why do my partially-disabled relatives now need to walk by themselves to their train seats? Just so that people who don't even read the instructions do not make a mistake that is going to result in a slap on the wrist fine (if anything, cause few revisors are going to fine you if you look touristy enough) ?

The only thing I keep hearing is how having no barriers at all is just intrinsically better, and difficulties with getting used which such system look like very minor compared to the difficulties with moving from a system with no barriers to a system with barriers, not mentioning the disadvantages for users.

> Yes, slowing down native users of public transportation because of tourists is a big, popular movement in places like Paris. /s

This argument falls flat give Japan's transit is infinitely more efficient and handles far more people than Paris. No one is slowed down by Japan's system.

No, it is not. You simply cannot claim a gate-less system can be slower than one with gates. It is physically impossible, as you're literally removing the potential for bottleneck.

Your generic comparison is moot anyway, because in Paris the normal metro system has had barriers since forever. It is the regional train system which used not to have gates.

> In addition, the annoyance of these gates comes from having to fiddle with the wallet, etc. in order to find the card or the phone, or the fact that multiples tries may be required for the reader to actually read it;

The NFC readers on the gates in Japan will read cards from several centimeters away. My phone, which has Osaifu-Keitai setup, can be left in my bag and I just wave my bag over the reader as I walk by. It is incredibly rare for a misread to occur. They just work.

No, they don't. Even TFA itself points that the moment you have two cards in close proximity, the reader will read nothing (and he points this as if it was a feature). This is why I have to stop and take my cards out of the wallet every time I want to go in.

try these[1], they go between cards and prevent the one behind it from being read.

1: https://www.google.com/search?q=%E6%94%B9%E6%9C%AD%E3%82%A8%...

With regards to latency, in Paris the biggest hurdle to increase trafic is people. You can quite literally walk through like on the Japanese video linked. But the vast majority don't.

The way it's supposed to work is that if you pass your card while the gate is opened, it keeps the gate open longer.

In practice most people wait for the gate to close in front of them before reopening it.

I'm not sure why people do fgaf. I think the reason is that this makes you look like a fraudster going right behind a valid passenger.

I do wait because I'm sure that my ticket is validated, and therefore won't be fined by a controller. Sometimes the machine visual/sound signal is broken, so no way to be 100% sure.

Makes sense. I've already been controlled several times after validating through a broken machine without any issue. But yeah it looks like the tide is changing and they are starting to fine for their own faults.

> If you really want to speed how people go through the gates, then _remove the damn gates_.

That comes with other problems.

Transit gates have the big advantage of providing you with instant feedback on whether your ticket or mode of payment is valid or not.

I've seen tourists get in trouble with ticket inspectors at least once in a very unpleasant way for simply having pressed the wrong button at an inscrutable ticket vending machine.

> I don't understand -- we are talking about 100ms or so of latency? which is almost completely dwarfed by any mechanical action such as the gates actually opening??

As others have already said, Japanese gates are open by default, and are more of a user interface indicator (to you and potentially station attendants nearby) than an actual physical barrier. You could step over or between the "barrier" that extends when the gate rejects your payment pretty easily in most, but it would be very obvious that you're skipping the fare.

> Transit gates have the big advantage of providing you with instant feedback on whether your ticket or mode of payment is valid or not.

So do the validators that are put in waiting areas, inside the trains, etc. in cities with no gates. That you can literally use at the time you want to use them (waiting for the train, inside the train, etc. ) , rather than forcing a bottleneck to everyone.

> As others have already said, Japanese gates are open by default

And this by itself already makes more of a latency difference than the entire IC card system does. Imagine what removing the gates altogether does.

How would removing the gate improve latency in a scenario where every passenger still has to tap their card at some reader?

Sure, you could spread the readers out a bit better across the platform etc., but that significantly weakens the "impossible to accidentally evade the fare" UX, as it still allows people to forget to tap when rushing for a train.

Many cities already have this. Most street trams have already this. Even London has no gates for the non-central stations. I tap either when I'm waiting for the tram, or when I'm literally already inside it. Even with only one validator and at rush hour, there's no queue.

If you already live in an area where there are no gates, would you make the argument that "I need gates so that I don't forget to tap"? Put yourself in my shoes: you would laugh at the idea.

And it doesn't need mentioning that people who want to intentionally skip fare can do so, gates or not.

Different transit systems have different user experience, yes.

> would you make the argument that "I need gates so that I don't forget to tap"? Put yourself in my shoes: you would laugh at the idea.

Yes, I'm making that argument. I've lived in places that don't have transit gates for the majority of my life, and I absolutely forgot buying a ticket a few times (since I usually have a monthly pass).

Being reminded about a monthly pass having run out by the gate, automatically charging for a single ride (if I have enough balance) so I can solve the problem later, is great UX.

The comparison video is kind of pointless since they're both at very slow times. If you see a Tokyo gate at rush hour with people packed wall-to-wall but moving quickly, that's what the latency was optimized for. And as others have mentioned, it's two things, speed and distance. FeliCa triggers both faster and farther away. And it never errors; you just made up that assumption. Also in Japan no one walks up to the gate and then fiddles with their wallet. Everyone knows proper transit etiquette from when they're very little.

Sometimes people will be low on balance and get rejected. People reroute quickly in normal conditions, but in rush hour that'll be a huge mess and everyone will be pissed at the culprit.

What you are describing is exactly all the problems with gates. Having them open-by-default improves somewhat. Having 100ms less reading time improves nothing. You are still limited by the speed of everyone else (cultural aspects are irrelevant as they are not improved by reader tech). If you want to improve entry throughput, have _no gate at all_ so that people do not have to bottleneck there. If you really have to put a validator, put it elsewhere.

And where would you put it? Anywhere you can think of would just be another (usually narrower) bottleneck.

In most stations, every available inch of width is used for these ‘gates’, and people move at a walking pace through them except for when people screw up. It’s a remarkably effective system.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44014412 to merge discussions.

It doesn’t work in high traffic areas, because the tap areas become impossible to get to if people actually use them - same bottle neck problem.

On busses they are de-facto soft gates, assuming the bus driver yells at you if you don’t use it - which often they do.

And why would they give up that sweet sweet rush hour revenue?

I understand your criticism since it seems that you never visited Japan, Tokyo specifically, before. The train/subway entrance gate is open by default. So if your ticket or IC card or phone didn't get registered properly because you don't have enough fund, the gate closes. And there are a lot of people that use the metro during rush hours, and when I said a lot, I mean it is basically a sea of people flowing through. And when those people are trying to get onto the platform, you want to make sure they walk past through the gates like they are just walking on street. Very fast scan with open gate makes it possible. You don't wait at the gate because you don't have to wait for ticket scan and gate door opening.

Also, if you use an iPhone (i don't have any experience with Android phone in Japan so I can't speak for it) to scan, you don't have to unlock the phone to use it. You simply reach into your pocket to grab your phone, and put the phone near the gate scanner as you approach the gate, and it scans instantly really fast (I was actually surprised how fast it was compared to the ones in Seoul). The experience feels like you are just walking through a narrow passage without any hindrance.

I also like your suggestion to remove the gates. When I visited Germany and Austria I really liked the subway there (no gates, and it even operates past midnight!). I saw only one ticket inspector out of probably about 20 subway rides when I was there, but it seems to work just fine. I am afraid such system might be abused in countries like Korea or China.

add: I also just realized that no gate system wouldn't work in Japan or Korea because during rush hour there is no way for ticket inspector to check the tickets of passengers on train. You are squeezed in each train unit like sardines squeezed in tin can.

The gates are extremely fast, and you don’t need to wait at all when you tap your card. In practice, this ends up being a pretty big deal for the number of passengers going through some of those gates. The whole experience is noticeably faster than any other ticket gate I’ve been through.

The absense of a negative is not a positive. It could be secure, or it could not. On the whole I’m inclined to believe that if it could be broken, it would have been in my lifetime.

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-b618-8012-82a3-b8b992ac83...

> 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.)