PASPY announced today that PASPY transit IC card service ends March 2025. The official replacement has been announced, billed as the “the fist Account Based Ticketing system in Japan” (yeah right) and launches October 2024. Main PASPY operator Hiroshima Electric Railway Co.,Ltd. (Hiroden) has been thinking out loud since last May that they planned to go all in with a QR Code smartphone app. Twitter users complain, a lot, that QR will be an inconvenient pain in the butt over what they have now.
Here’s the thing, most people assume that killing PASPY card means Hiroden and Hiroshima region PASPY transit partners will rip out all the FeliCa readers and replace them with optical code readers. I don’t think so. FeliCa PASPY cards will disappear but not the transit IC readers. If you listen carefully to Hiroden’s bitching and moaning about having to shoulder PASPY system costs from the PASPY/FeliCa fare processing server side (that the PASPY partners don’t help us enough with…boo-hoo-hoo). Dump that and get out of the plastic card issue business, leave ICOCA / Transit IC readers where they are and let them handle their own fare processing, retrofit a QR scanner or install Denso Wave QR+NFC readers, toss out a QR PASPY app and the PASPY associates can call it a day.
PASPY had all the limitations of region transit cards: no e-money functions for store purchases to juice the recharge business side, slowly declining ridership, and the card could not be used on JR West ICOCA and larger Transit IC network…limitations that the Suica 2 in 1 Region Affiliate program resolves. Too bad JR West doesn’t have a similar program for the ICOCA region but it says something about JR West and local government relations that Hiroshima City and prefecture officials have kept quiet.
Nevertheless, there are way too many ICOCA and Mobile Suica users out there and Mobile ICOCA goes live 12 months from now. PASPY partners will want to keep those users riding no matter what Hiroden ends up doing. And local government transit subsidies will help keep the Transit IC readers in place. The whole point of transit is encouraging people to use it…right? And if it all works out, for QR based PASPY MaaS with Transit IC support, all the better.
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