I believe QR codes are mostly intended to replace paper/magnetic single-ride tickets, not IC cards, in most transit systems.
Magnetic tickets are already slower than IC cards, and are both more expensive to produce and harder to recycle than QR codes printed on regular paper.
Not only more expensive to produce and recycle, but the gates have to be extremely complex to handle paper tickets (some railway museums in Japan have them cross-cut on display!).
I’ve only used them twice (on Sinkansen, and on a regular train in Hokkaido), and it was nearly instantaneous – about as fast as an IC card. The whole experience felt like magic: you put the tichets into a slot, whoosh! – and you pick them up on the other side.
It is true that they are expensive to produce and hard to recycle, though, so it’s a good idea overall. But I’ll miss this iconic experience (or hopefully they retain it on some lines at least). (Edit: or just make the whoosh! readers work with QR codes! :)
It’s not quite the same, but if you tap your IC card with a preloaded Shinkansen ticket, you at least get a rapidly printed seat indicator :)
Another cool thing about the paper tickets is that you can supposedly insert them stacked (i.e. both Shinkansen and regional transit ticket at a transit gate), and the gate will figure out which one to eat and which one to hand back to you!
Hmm, I thought you can preload a transit ticket but still need to buy a paper-only Shinkansen seat ticket :thinking:
And yeah, the ticket unstacking feature is really neat! (and probably it’s one of the reasons they want to replace the paper tickets – it’s a pretty complex machine on the inside :-)
That is quite interesting. I took normal-speed medium-distance trains in Taiwan and there are many similarities to Japan. The ticket-checking gates to enter/exit the station are exactly the same models used in Japan. The tickets are similar to the ones used in Japan, but they have a QR Code printed on them and might not be magnetic. Even when you exit the station, the ticket gate will give back your ticket - unlike Japan!
The normal ticket gate behavior in Japan is that when you enter, the gate gives you the ticket back so that you can carry it all the way to the exit in order to prove that you traveled that journey. When you go through a ticket gate to exit the station, all Japanese ticket gates to my knowledge will dispose of your ticket.
I retained approximately one ticket in Japan. It was due to walking through a transfer exit gate at some station of the Tokyo Metro, which lets you walk through a non-fare-paid area to re-enter another station.
I also retained all the Shinkansen seat reservation tickets (特急券) back when I had the old-style JR Pass, where you always had to enter/exit stations with help from the station attendant - and not use automatic ticket gates. I haven't tried the current style of JR Pass (since maybe 2022?), but I imagine that the exit gate would eat your seat reservation ticket, just like if you had bought the ticket in cash.
I hope it lasts, but I'm seeing gates which have QR code readers, IC card readers,and contactless payment readers, which is obviously unsustainable. One or more of these will have to give eventually, and given Japan's tolerance for QR code payments (PayPay is massive) and foreigners' familiarity with contactless it seems like IC is the most likely one to go.
I'd be sad if they do go or get relegated to some app, I love the little mascots.
> I hope it lasts, but I'm seeing gates which have QR code readers, IC card readers,and contactless payment readers, which is obviously unsustainable.
Why is this obvious unsustainable? The IC readers and contactless payment readers are normally built on exactly the same tech, or very similar tech. And they’re pretty much always just a single reader capable handling IC cards and contactless payments locally, with back office processing to manage bookkeeping, and any needed external transaction processing.
TfL in London has been operating paper tickets, contactless and IC card for something like two decades now. The IC system is starting to show its age, but that’s only because the current stored value cards don’t have enough on-board storage to handle the continued growth of TfLs systems, and all the new regions they now operate in. But even if the IC system they have plans to migrate and merge their IC and contactless system into one system that can handle both payment types and provide proper feature parity between them.
I thought contactless is considered too slow? The exit gates are often open and only close when somebody attempts to pass without their IC card/insufficient balance on the IC card, how does this work with contactless?
I feel like they could combine the IC and contactless reader into one bit of hardware with some engineering.
> I feel like they could combine the IC and contactless reader into one bit of hardware with some engineering.
This is the case in the Netherlands. The same readers accept the old OV-chipkaart (stored-value) system and the new OVpay (EMV) system.
Actually, I feel like when the OVpay system was rolled out, the existing OV-chipkaart readers simply got a firmware update, giving them the ability to read EMV cards and phones.
Both of these systems work across all tranit modes and operators in the entire country (and even at a few stations across the German border), and there are various models of reader that are used.
They've gotten NFC VISA payWave at least comparably fast as FeliCa by skipping a few checks. It's still not as fast as genuine Suica - look how hard these men force their own fist to stay on the reader like their pay depends on it[1], but Suica advantages are slowly becoming a tougher sell with population and economy going a long way down.
A perfectly aligned QR code, displayed on a bright mobile phone display, can work acceptably fast.
Practically, many people however only start thinking about possibly needing to open some app to display it while they’re already blocking everybody else’s way at the transit gate…
The biggest practical benefit of IC cards is that they are by nature always “armed”, unlike QR codes in apps, and are readable from both sides.
On top of that, due to being able to run mutual authentication and being able to store a trusted balance, they are much more resilient to outages of any backend system. QR code tickets invariably need networking and a central backend.
> Practically, many people however only start thinking about possibly needing to open some app to display it while they’re already blocking everybody else’s way at the transit gate…
This really comes down to adoption. In China, where QR is ubiquitous, almost everyone has the QR ready to scan well before they reach the scanner.
