East Japan Railways & major private railways phasing out magnetic paper tickets

[bill937ca]

Sora News reports East Japan Railway Company, the largest rail operator in the Tokyo area and east Japan, has announced that it will be phasing out its current form of physical paper tickets. The announcement was made on Wednesday, with seven other rail companies, Keisei, Keikyu, Shin Keisei, Seibu, Tobu, Tokyo Monorail, and Hokuso, stating that they will be doing the same.

 

https://soranews24.com/2024/05/30/east-japan-railways-phasing-out-magnetic-paper-tickets-seven-other-rail-operators-will-too/

 

Japanese language You Tube video

 

 

[Beaver]

How nice of them to still give you the option of a paper ticket rather than try and force everyone onto an app or something. Looks like the shape and size and general layout will still say the same too, retaining that evolutionary lineage right back to the earliest British style pasteboard tickets from the Meiji era.

 

I expect a QR code will be considerably more reliable than the magnetic strip. Magnetic strips can get worn off or demagnetised easily. Especially if they are poor quality. On British railways the failure rate of magnetic strips is absolutely chronic. Every ticket gate needs to be staffed just to deal with the sheer number of people whose tickets get rejected by the barriers because something has gone wrong with the magnetic strip without anything being visibly wrong with the ticket. By contrast it takes a lot more, and obvious, damage to the ticket to make a QR code unreadable.

 

From an enthusiasts point of view, the barrier not eating your ticket at the destination means you can now easily keep the tickets as mementos of your journeys! (I will confess to having sometimes when visiting local lines exploited various loopholes to avoid giving up the ticket to keep for my collection (getting off at a minor station with no barrier and walking the rest of the way, or suchlike).

[kuro68000]

It's so long since I used one other than for Shinkansen. I didn't even realize they had mag strips.

 

The bus ones surprised me because you just throw them into the same slot as the coins and somehow it figures it all out.

 

Which reminds me, there was something on NHK about restaurants with ticket vending machines having to pay to get them updated for the new 10,000 yen notes. I guess all the train companies had to upgrade their machines too.

[Dillon]

6 hours ago, Beaver said:

How nice of them to still give you the option of a paper ticket rather than try and force everyone onto an app or something.

I'm glad too, it's good for folks who aren't tech savvy.

[Rod.H]

On 5/31/2024 at 6:26 AM, mojo said:

Which reminds me, there was something on NHK about restaurants with ticket vending machines having to pay to get them updated for the new 10,000 yen notes. I guess all the train companies had to upgrade their machines too.

 

That's common with all things with note acceptors, as they have a limited memory capacity and depending on the type know like 4 notes to some with info of 10 or more notes. It means that if a special commemorative note is made, it won't be in the system. Still kicking myself for not stepping in when I saw someone trying to feed a 1988 AUD$10 note into a self-serve to swap the note

[kuro68000]

52 minutes ago, Rod.H said:

 

That's common with all things with note acceptors, as they have a limited memory capacity and depending on the type know like 4 notes to some with info of 10 or more notes. It means that if a special commemorative note is made, it won't be in the system. Still kicking myself for not stepping in when I saw someone trying to feed a 1988 AUD$10 note into a self-serve to swap the note

 

Oh, so it's a software issue? Not a mechanical one? I don't know what security Japan uses on its bank notes, but I suppose it makes sense that it would just be a different pattern of outputs from various sensors. Not like coin mechs where they have to be physically sized for specific coins.

[Rod.H]

It's kinda both, as the acceptors I know of optically scan the note and match it against a set of recorded values: length, width, and physical security features. Memory used to be expensive hence if the country uses a limited number of notes they could get away with less values. For Australia, that started to break down when they introduced a second $5 to circulate, as they then announced new versions of $10, $20 & $50. If the correct note reader was installed, a software patch fixed it, else wise it involved a replacement acceptor head to the entire mechanism, to resolve.  

 

To bring it back to transport, boarding passes in Australia used to use magnetic strips and readers at the gate for some major airports, they've in this decade have replaced that with barcodes, both standard and QR, with QR being more on the digital boarding pass. I've not seen what paper tickets are used as I've not needed to use one for a bit. I think Sydney still has magstripe ticket along side their Oyster card version

 

[kuro68000]

I wonder how reliable the mag strips are. The last time I bought was one in the UK, and the ticket wouldn't work with any gate. It came from the same machine as two others which were fine. Unfortunately by the time I realized that it was the ticket and not the gate at the first station, it was too late to go back and they couldn't exchange it anywhere else (because it's Britain).

[Rod.H]

Considering the amount of gunk I had to clean off the bits that move notes through note acceptors, it's probably a similar deal with the moving parts of a stripe reader. As for faulty ticket's your ticket might not have been faulty, the device that issued the ticket could've had the fault

 

[kuro68000]

1 minute ago, Rod.H said:

Considering the amount of gunk I had to clean off the bits that move notes through note acceptors, it's probably a similar deal with the moving parts of a stripe reader. As for faulty ticket's your ticket might not have been faulty, the device that issued the ticket could've had the fault

 

 

Could be. Weird that the other two were okay, but maybe something like an unstable power supply affected just one of them. Years back I nearly took a job at a company that makes bank note counting and counterfeit detection hardware. It seemed interesting but I think they wanted to do a security clearance check and I figured that having only recently returned to the UK and being married to a foreigner it wasn't worth the hassle.