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.
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.
(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.
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 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.
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.
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...
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Maybe you can refill it with cash? Or did I have to buy it with cash? and when you leave everything expires.
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.
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...
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.