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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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:
> 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 ?
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 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
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> [...] 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.
>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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
lorenzotenti|9 months ago
mitthrowaway2|9 months ago
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.
movedx|9 months ago
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.
suddenexample|9 months ago
robert3005|9 months ago
m463|9 months ago
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.
Arn_Thor|9 months ago
numpad0|9 months ago
aikinai|9 months ago
On the other hand, Android phones only support it if they are Japan-region phones.
ynx|9 months ago
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.
aecsocket|9 months ago
delfinom|9 months ago
Patents hold it back on Android. Apple just got themselves a licensing deal that apparently lets them just have it on all phones.
tkgally|9 months ago
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.”
lxgr|9 months ago
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 :)
bamboozled|9 months ago
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 ?
thm|9 months ago
rootsudo|9 months ago
astrange|9 months ago
This is a fun thing to keep in mind when people tell you Japan is a "homogenous society".
(It's not high-trust either.)
eloisius|9 months ago
lhl|9 months ago
yuye|9 months ago
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.
anArbitraryOne|9 months ago
sriamanan|9 months ago
TheChaplain|9 months ago
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.
numpad0|9 months ago
mschild|9 months ago
0xCMP|9 months ago
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.
oivey|9 months ago
pwim|9 months ago
lxgr|9 months ago
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.
charcircuit|9 months ago
>It will continue to accept national IC cards such as Suica and Icoca
tonyhart7|9 months ago
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???
ranma42|9 months ago
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.
dadadad100|9 months ago
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
PaulHoule|9 months ago
aecsocket|9 months ago
makeitdouble|9 months 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.
avianlyric|9 months ago
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.
lxgr|9 months ago
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.
timewizard|9 months ago
> 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.
londons_explore|9 months 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.
ksec|9 months ago
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.
f_devd|9 months ago
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).
socalgal2|9 months ago
> 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?
aecsocket|9 months ago
I will write a correction for this section to clear up the confusion.
lxgr|9 months ago
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).
dal|9 months ago
numpad0|9 months ago
artdigital|9 months ago
mrb|9 months ago
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.
delfinom|9 months ago
And a good chunk of vending machines in Japan accept the IC card. Sometimes even food shops a step above vending machines.
seanmcdirmid|9 months ago
soruly|9 months ago
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
tiffanyh|9 months ago
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.
toxik|9 months ago
makeitdouble|9 months ago
PS: For anyone in doubt https://atadistance.net/2017/09/12/iphone-x-keynote-global-f...
lhl|9 months ago
miki123211|9 months ago
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.
kirici|9 months ago
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.
soruly|9 months ago
Marsymars|9 months ago
grishka|9 months ago
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.
asimops|9 months ago
Reason077|9 months ago
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.
lxgr|9 months ago
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.
kccqzy|9 months ago
pkage|9 months ago
lxgr|9 months ago
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.
raluk|9 months ago
lxgr|9 months ago
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.
emursebrian|9 months ago
Japan's transportation infrastructure is great!
ksec|9 months ago
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.
thrance|9 months ago
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.
ishanjain28|9 months ago
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.
mmooss|9 months ago
> 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?
abdullahkhalids|9 months ago
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?
lyall|9 months ago
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.
Symbiote|9 months ago
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.
mifydev|9 months ago
barnabee|9 months ago
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.
chgs|9 months ago
lmm|9 months ago
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.
walthamstow|9 months ago
zparky|9 months ago
lxgr|9 months ago
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.
vachina|9 months ago
If the protocol is designed well, high speed doesn’t mean high error rate either.
deergomoo|9 months ago
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.
coolcase|9 months ago
bamboozled|9 months ago
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...
dmitrysergeyev|9 months ago
commandersaki|9 months ago
RajT88|9 months ago
amelius|9 months ago
AStonesThrow|9 months ago
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.
hoppp|9 months ago
Symbiote|9 months ago
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.
vardai|9 months ago
NanoYohaneTSU|9 months ago
frakkingcylons|9 months ago
ZeroNietzsche|9 months ago
hotpepperishot|9 months ago
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AshamedCaptain|9 months ago
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.
askvictor|9 months ago
socalgal2|9 months ago
(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.
Washuu|9 months ago
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.
phh|9 months ago
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.
lxgr|9 months ago
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.
aikinai|9 months ago
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.
sejin8642|9 months ago
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.
wolfd|9 months ago
Aeolun|9 months ago
lhl|9 months ago
aspenmayer|9 months ago
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.