People not in Japan/Singapore/Korea/China should experience what a proper transit card done looks like.
It's also useful in that you can pre-order a Shinkansen ticket, for example, and link that purchase to your Suica card, which you then use for the Shinkansen gate. If there are other fees (which there may be) they're just deducted from the money the card holds, as usual. Makes everything very simple.
For me a physical card is easier than using a phone. A phone is so much larger so I would need to get it from a pocket somewhere, while the Suica card I can keep in my jeans pocket or some other easy place.
Also, travelers beware: some of the special "Suica" sold at Haneda (and maybe Narita, too?) expires and is completely dead after 30 days, even if it has a balance. I found this out the hard way. Buy a proper Suica at Shinagawa or another non-airport station.
(yes, the antenna is in the top FaceID/Dynamic Island area, Osaifu Keitai spec requires a □つ icon wherever antenna is located, which Apple managed to completely ignore)
Because it's not the easiest setting to find: Settings/Wallet & Apple Pay/Express Transit Card
Every time I see a shoddy piece of work, I know which constraint was sacrificed.
In Prague city transit does not have limiting gates. If you bought unlimited ticket, you just walk in bus/tram/metro and that is it. No touching, scanning, showing, nothing. Maybe once a month (or even rarer) you might encounter a patrolling controller who would ask you to show your ticket, but that's it.
Makes for such a smooth journey as most people are doing the right thing.
And that's the difference. IIRC, you have to periodically top up your Suica card with money which then gets deducted from the balance each time you use it.
In Europe, there is no such thing - sure, you can buy a lot of single ride tickets and then use them when you need to, but you have to stamp the ticket when you start each ride, which does seem a little more inconvenient.
The European public transport system is not some centralised system that should be generalised like this. The system in the Netherlands has worked like Suica for years (but without the extremely fast card reading unfortunately). You simply tap on with your public transport card or bank/credit card and tap out when you get off. Subscriptions, automatic/manual top ups, it's all possible.
- In London you top up your Oyster card and pay a fare according to the zone your travelling to. Metro is gated.
- In Paris your load up tickets in your Navigo pass and pay a flat rate every time you take the metro or RER. It's also gated.
- In most (all ?) Swiss cities you don't have any card to charge and have to get a ticket for every travel (like in London your fare amount depends is zone dependent); however there's an app that let you get your location at the start of your travel and end of your travel and automatically charges you the correct fare. There are no gates.
A lot of European folks seem to have positive experiences with the validator system as something convenient, less intrusive and high bandwidth, overall superior, but personally I doubt it scales out to scale and transit models of places like Shinjuku. Most rides in Tokyo commuter rails are point to point and Japanese commuters go through gate like a marching army, so it means temporary riders has to disrupt the march to get to the validator, and also a single validator in the middle of the gate area isn't going to meet demands but increasing the number of the machines kills the benefits.
btw: JRE is actually doing experiments with more modernized touch-free gates, one based on facial recognition a la Minority Report, and another based on UWB radio gadget added to phones. It is speculated that UWB is likely the intended path forward.
Only Japan is on another level
Definitely better than the QR codes used by China.
Apple pays the fee for all phones in the world to have the chip. Google only pays for Japan devices.
https://xdaforums.com/t/global-pixel-device-unlock-felica-su...
I assume it's a licensing issue, where Google is too cheap to pay JR for the phones sold outside of Japan, so only setup the JP models and only pay the license for those.
It used to be easy to get one from a 7-11, then it was hard for a bit, then it was easy again with digital wallets.
Anyway, that problem is long gone.
You just tap Buy Suica and insert two 1000 yen bills. The system keeps 500 yen as a deposit, which is refunded when you return the card, but it's also $3.50 for a little memorabilia.
If you absolutely don't want the keepsake, you can create a virtual card from Wallet on iPhone(7 or later). I believe an app is not needed through that path. Those can be loaded from your credit card, or at pink ticket vendors with the cavity for devices(IIRC the latter didn't work initially).
I believe you can't get a physical one from the ticket machines anymore unless you are getting a commuter pass, but I might be wrong.
Took me roughly a minute to create one within Apple Wallet ahead of my trip, and that was it. Didn't need to install any apps or register on any websites, because creating a Suica card is natively supported in the wallet app.
Idk how the situation is like with Suica card on Android though, outside of the fact that unless the phone was purchased in Japan, it will typically lack the necessary hardware for it (which isn't a concern with iPhones, because all regional versions include it).
The digital version only works on iPhones, since Android phones sold outside Japan doesn't have the Felica chip, or if they have it (e.g. Google Pixel) is disabled in EU/US firmware because the manufacturer doesn't want to pay a fee for every phone to Sony for something 99.999% of people that will never travel to Japan would use.
Totally forgot about that aspect, you are 100% correct.
I remember traveling with my friend who had a physical card, and more than once we had to reroute to a nearby kiosk and wait in line, so he could recharge the balance on the card. Apple Wallet felt more convenient, because recharging it was as simple as picking the amount to recharge and hitting "submit."
Your explanation makes more sense, because it is definitely cheaper/easier to just disable (but include) that hardware to avoid licensing fees (as opposed to having an additional factory manufacturing line just to produce the SKUs that physically exclude that hardware).
Maybe you can refill it with cash? Or did I have to buy it with cash? and when you leave everything expires.
I had to get 4 as I was traveling with kids who don't own phones and could get cheaper rates, took a few minutes, you waste a few yen but get to keep the souvenir.
During my last visit to London (in 2025), it felt noticeably slower than even NYC subway tap-to-pay.
Suica is a whole other beast that isn't even in the same category of speed. It genuinely feels sub-200ms instantaneous.
(I haven't used the NYC system.)
I remember when they first allowed card use more than a decade ago and it broke the flow quite a bit at rush hour as people were so used to the Oyster card's timing that they'd run into the back of people using cards or people using cards would run into the gate as it had not opened as quickly as they were used to. Quite a bit of commentary around it during that time:
https://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/2zc104/that_extra_s...
I was honestly so impressed by that, you mean I can just tap on? Don’t need to stand here outside the gates for 10 minutes entering my info into a frustrating app? Don’t need to buy a $10 card, only $5 of which I’ll ever use? Even with suica being pretty easy to set up on iPhone, this is definitely something Sydney’s got over Japan’s system.
Meanwhile Hobart and Darwin are free PT right now.
I feel either the gate is making international round trip calls through the internet to some SaaS service. Our it's actually doing a face scan and lookup.
It reminds me of that oft touted experiment where a light lit up within some number of milliseconds of a person hitting a button, and people perceive it as happening before they hit the button.
When you remove the network and run locally, you’d expect it to be amazingly fast.
But it’s also effectively physical cash. And that has many downsides as well.
In NY, sometime i have to double pay because the card that worked on bus doesn't work on subway...
I don't often do transfers, though.
There's a big difference in antisocial behaviour and visible mental health issues between Tokyo and San Francisco.
"San Francisco’s BART found that systemwide crime fell 41 percent after new gates were installed. Even more impressively, across the ten stations with the most corrective maintenance needs, staff time spent on in-system maintenance fell 96 percent, which suggests that fare evaders also cause most unreported crime, like littering, vandalism, and graffiti."
https://www.city-journal.org/article/transit-crime-fare-gate...
From the underlying press release (emphasis added): BART PD boosted the visible safety presence in the system by doubling officer presence systemwide and ensuring police are riding trains more. This approach is strengthened by BART’s ongoing use of unarmed Crisis Intervention Specialists, Transit Ambassadors, Fare Inspectors, and Community Service Officers.
Safety efforts were also bolstered by the installation of 715 new fare gates at all 50 stations, a project completed in August 2025, four months ahead of schedule.
More to the point, mone of that is relevant to the fact that the giant gates impose a burden on lawful users as well as any criminals they might deter, nor is it relevant to the extremely slow performance of the automated gates themselves. The experience of riding BART sucks for law-abiding paying passengers.
Reading this article it makes sense why it feels too fast to be real, especially when using a powered phone. The things are already communicating as my hand is moving towards the reader. By the time it gets there, it's happened.
Stunningly good.