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.
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.
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.
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.
On the other hand, Android phones only support it if they are Japan-region phones.
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 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.
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.
Patents hold it back on Android. Apple just got themselves a licensing deal that apparently lets them just have it on all phones.
It's surprising that it can be added back on Pixels, I thought it would use something like factory generated certificates.
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.”
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 :)
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 ?
This is a fun thing to keep in mind when people tell you Japan is a "homogenous society".
(It's not high-trust either.)
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_Mutual_Usage_Servic...
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.
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.
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.
I think most QR systems include some sort of rolling timestamp to combat that.
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.
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.
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 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???
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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?
I will write a correction for this section to clear up the confusion.
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....
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)
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).
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.
And a good chunk of vending machines in Japan accept the IC card. Sometimes even food shops a step above vending machines.
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...
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
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.
PS: For anyone in doubt https://atadistance.net/2017/09/12/iphone-x-keynote-global-f...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Japan's transportation infrastructure is great!
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 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.
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.
> 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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If the protocol is designed well, high speed doesn’t mean high error rate either.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
