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.
I've went through gates without ticket several times for reasons like access to coin lockers or switching to the other track when I've entered the wrong one. Gate guards usually hand you a slip that explains the situation at the other gate or when leaving again.
I've had the opposite: I entered a large station at the west entrance as a transfer from a local train run by a different company. The platform I needed was next to the east entrance. Fine. On the platform was a sign (in English!) reminding tourists they needed a seat reservation, which I hadn't purchased.
The sign said the machine to issue the seat supplements was at the east entrance — the other side of the gates from me, of course.
The guard at the gates understood me, but said I must exit back the way I came, i.e. all the way back to the west entrance. That side of the station 'belonged' to the other railway company, and there wasn't a machine to sell the ticket I needed. I could either walk the really long way around by road (not through the station) or queue at the general ticket office.
So I missed that train.
In general, I found the train ticketing system for regional or long-distance trains needlessly complicated compared to Europe, with base tickets, express supplements and seat reservations all separate fees, and coming as 1, 2 or 3 bits of paper depending on I know not what.
On one occasion a journey with a transfer came on 7 separate tickets. (Of course, the Japanese approach to this problem is not to simplify the ticketing system, but to invent a machine that can suck in all 7 tickets, cancel the relevant ones, and discharge them neatly arranged.)
I fully agree that the base fare + whatever on top type of ticketing system is needlessly complex and confusing. We've almost missed a train because we were not aware we needed to buy base fare separately, and only found out because we asked a station employee for the way to the tracks who then informed us we're missing some tickets.
Same in the Taipei Metro system. Stations often have facilities(like toilets, stores and lockers) within the paid area. However, getting in and out at the same station charges you the base cost: NT$20 (About US$0.66).
For example: You'd explain to the staff that you want to use the toilets, and they'll hand you a plastic NFC token coin, limited to enter and exit at the same station. You use that to enter the paid area, go to the toilet, then deposit the coin in a special slot to exit.
>Gate guards usually hand you a slip that explains the situation at the other gate or when leaving again.
That was done in the past, but it's quite nice that they just hand you a token now.
Alternatively, train stations in the Netherlands have done away with fees for entering and exiting the same station altogether. Toilets within stations often charge a €0,70 fee, though.
That's only enabled by the difference in culture though, right? Japanese culture has a much higher emphasis on order and following the rules - I don't know that this "open-by-default" system would work in, for instance, the US.
Japanese transit-using society is old and middle-class; those are the kind of people who follow rules.
Americans are often more rule bound than Japanese people (we have HOAs and Nextdoor), but we just don't respect transit systems as much because we think of them as gifts we give to the poor/mentally ill/homeless.
And then a lot of Americans have an anti-gentrification ideology ("rent-lowering gunshots" or "neighborhood character") which says that anything made for poor people must be kept old and dirty or else rich people will show up and take it away from them.
I had never noticed it like that but now I’m dead.
When I moved to my current neighborhood I asked why there was no public transportation and someone said it was so poor people couldn’t be around and I hadn’t connected this to the wider culture.
I was talking to someone about some existing bicycle road infrastructure that ran through several neighborhoods, rich and poor, in a large city. They said when it first was built, some people in the rich neighborhood objected because they said criminals would use it to come to their neighborhood. (The city is mostly on a grid, including this neighborhood, making the whole idea absurd anyway.)
I had long ago pointed out to them that much of the bike infrastructure connects wealthy neighborhoods with wealthy neighborhoods.
Along the public transit line (ha!), the person primarily in charge of NYC’s road design and public transit planning back in the day made several anti-poor design choices, like ensuring overpasses crossing roads to less-poor (I.e. more-white) areas were just low enough that public busses couldn’t pass under them, as well as planning off-ramps that dumped a majority of the smog-ridden traffic into poorer neighborhoods, and let’s not forget how public parks in poorer neighborhoods had little monkeys adorning the fences. If you’ve ever wondered why a dangerously busy road with little in the way of safety measures for pedestrians cut between a neighborhood and a shopping district, you can thank Robert Moses.
Old meaning not young. Pretty much all crimes or any other forms of messy behavior worldwide are committed by young men.
But the median age in NYC is 38 and Tokyo is 45. (source: two Google searches I just did). That means a lot!
It's true they don't jump the gates often and they don't have loud panhandlers. Instead the societal transit ills are passed out drunks, suicides and molesters. (Not meaning these actually happen all the time, it's just my impression of what people talk about.)
> it’s pretty much everyone who is not filthy rich isn’t it?
Hmm, it's more about what you're doing, I think? Rich people use transit all the time if it serves their purposes afaik. One thing that helps in Japan is the culture of wearing face masks means you won't be recognized in public. (Obviously this doesn't work if you're like a 7' NBA player.)
For going between cities the trains are actually the nice expensive option, and flying or taking a night bus is cheaper.
But trains are also basically only good at carrying yourself. If you're traveling in a group, or carrying equipment with you, or don't want to walk a lot then you'd still want to drive or take a taxi locally.
while it's not an apples:apples comparison, in contrast, only 5% of American workers commute by public transportation[1], which means >90% commute by car. From this, one can make educated guesses on the socioeconomic status slices that make use of public transit for each respective group - 5% vs 50%
> we just don't respect transit systems as much because we think of them as gifts we give to the poor/mentally ill/homeless.
> And then a lot of Americans have an anti-gentrification ideology ("rent-lowering gunshots"
I think the ideology is in the parent comment. I ride lots of public transit and don't hear or see these things. The largest American public transit system, in NYC, certainly isn't seen as a gift other than by New Yorkers to themselves.
FWIW, I've seen American transit systems that let people board without even being asked to pay. I've seen plenty of bus drivers wave through people who couldn't pay. On one bus a teen boarded and walked straight to their seat. The bus driver, in an authoritative parental voice, kept summoning them to the front. There they lectured them: It's ok, but you need to talk to me first.
Please don't read too much into it. Outside of the peak demand at least here, in Kansai area, gates will close when they sense you approaching to indicate that you actually need to touch the card or insert a ticket. They stay open only if there is a continuous flow of passengers going one after another.
Another interesting fact is that gates' actuators are not super rigid and it's completely possible to force enter not realizing in time your card has failed (you will be approached by station attendant though).
To summarize, culture may play a role but the main differentiator is the high traffic volume.
As I said in another comment, I've used US systems where you board the vehicle (bus/train) before paying, and bus drivers wave you past if you can't pay. On the train, you get a free ride to the next stop.
On the Phoenix area light rail the only way they (used to, at least) tell if you have a valid ticket is random security patrols checking everyone on the train. No gates, no nothing.
During covid they even stopped checking the validity of the tickets and all you needed was to be in possession of 'a ticket' -- I used the same one for a couple years and still have the thing in my wallet in case I ever go back there again.
Couldn't even begin to count the number of times I saw people get off the train as soon as they saw security get on and just wait for the next train.
They went to a stored value card in the last year or so. It's the ugliest one I've seen (big ugly UPC code on the front, I guess maybe for convenience to sell them at retailers outside the transit stations)
You don’t have to wait for the doors to close to be able to scan your ticket in London Underground. The gate will stay open and let you through. It’s a little bit awkward since you have to approach as you scan your ticket leading to your hand lagging behind
Japan has a fascinating environment. It is very uplifting. Japanese citizens do not seem to participate in crime.
I wondered about this and discussed it with an american friend who lived there for a couple decades and whose kids were born there.
He said that they talk about everything in school. They go through scenarios like stealing, and have long discussions in class. They will discuss what happens, how people feel and what is the outcome. so education.
On the other hand, I commented on the nice society with japanese citizens and they have counterpoints, like "japan is too slow to change" and the like.
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.
"... write your infrastructure definitions in Go or Rust, compile it to WebAssembly, and then you take input and output Kubernetes manifests that get applied to the cluster."
Are we repeating history though? I've worked for a company that used Oracle plsql for everything (shall we return html snippets from the database as a reactive frontend, why not!, the whole business logic is in huge stored procedures anyway) and it was clearly an utter mess. Now, new tools may make this better, but every time I see too much business logic getting close to SQL I get suspicious.
Supabase is another example of doing everything with postgres. Sounds cool, but is it maintainable?
Tangentially, it’s curious there hasn’t emerged A Proper Way of version controlling and deploying stored procedures outside of “stick a bunch of sql scripts in a folder in the project root”
Is there anything wrong with that approach? It seems pretty optimal to me, since you'll probably want to commit the stored procedures together with regular code.
