I'm looking forward to not having to choose one trade-off over the other.
Here's a good summary of NFC protocols used for transit gates: https://atadistance.net/2020/06/13/transit-gate-evolution-wh...
The Felica standard is fastest at 100ms per tap, and is used in Japan (e.g. Suica card) and Hong Kong (Octopus card).
https://support.apple.com/en-us/118625
You don't have to unlock your phone -- just tap. If you have an Apple watch, just put your wrist to the reader.
I use this all the time in NYC and it's so fast.
It’s still fast enough that it will read my Apple Watch before the gate starts to close from the passenger in front of me.
One saved trip to an Oyster top-up machine will make up for a lifetime of contactless NFC latency!
The Japanese transit cards that are supported by Apple Pay have that option, and it's arguably the best of both worlds.
It is, there’s even an auto top-up option that adds credit automatically if your balance drops below a certain level.
But there’s no “digital” Oyster card, only physical ones. If you want to use a device to pay you have to use contactless.
And either way, it’s still kind of a pain to have to maintain a balance - especially if you’re a tourist or visitor and don’t know exactly how much credit you’re going to need.
I agree that being able to load a transit card into Apple Pay etc is also a good solution. The convenience of not having a physical card that can be easily lost or forgotten is probably the biggest benefit for me.
Octopus (used in Hong Kong) is the one that supports virtual cards in Apple Wallet.
In Japan credit card transactions routinely take a couple seconds. Imagine each person taking 5 seconds to go through the gate! I think what trials for credit card payments in transportation services there are doing is simply not processing the transaction inline, and just doing it after the fact (assuming it will go through).
If you try to use a card that is valid but has no available balance/credit, it might work for the first ride but then be blocked when you try to use it for the return trip.
Fares are batched throughout the day and you are charged once, overnight, for all rides that day (after applying any multi-ride discounts, etc).
This is different from some other cities where I’ve used contactless payments and they’d charge you immediately for each ride, giving you lots of annoying little charges on your bank statement!
Don't ask me how though
Wrong. With the traffic volumes normally seen in Tokyo, those few hundred extra milliseconds will cause huge delays at the fare gates. There's a reason the systems here use the Felica card which processes in 100ms: it's really needed for this kind of pedestrian volume.