>It will continue to accept national IC cards such as Suica and Icoca
I'd be sad if they do go or get relegated to some app, I love the little mascots.
Some are cutting back to just Suica and Icoca. Some are switching to, or using from the start, tap-and-pay (Visa, EMV, etc.).
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???
PS: For anyone in doubt https://atadistance.net/2017/09/12/iphone-x-keynote-global-f...
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.
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.)
(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.
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.
And faster throughput would just increase that.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.”
This is a fun thing to keep in mind when people tell you Japan is a "homogenous society".
(It's not high-trust either.)
PaulHoule•1d ago
aecsocket•1d ago
PaulHoule•1d ago
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.
brigandish•1h ago
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.
toxik•3h ago
chgs•3h ago
aecsocket•2h ago
Here's an example video to show the gates in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YffjxN3KsD4
londons_explore•3h ago
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.
makeitdouble•2h ago
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.