SUGOCA – AtaDistance

Reliance on legacy paper tickets instead of increasing Transit IC use has created big fare evasion loop holes as JR West cuts costs and increases the number of staff-less stations.

I really like YouTuber kenzy201’s latest post regarding the mysterious disappearance of the ¥170 paper ticket button at JR Kyushu Kokura station kiosks. Kenzy’s simple no frills talk style might look boring on the surface but his analysis is keen and enlightening, the kind of analysis we used to get with good journalists who don’t have the time for it anymore. I highly recommend listening to what he has to say here.

When JR Kyushu revealed the reasons behind their elimination of the ¥170 paper ticket option from JR Kokura station kiosks, it shined an uncomfortable light on their operations. Because of poor management decisions over the past decade that continued JR Kyushu’s reliance on paper tickets at the expense of leveraging SUGOCA, the result was 90% of ¥170 tickets sold at Kokura station were being used for fare evasion. Cheap passage to any paper ticket unmanned station on their system. This is because JR Kyushu has a continued reliance on legacy paper tickets instead of increasing SUGOCA transit card coverage and promoting its use, and because of cost cutting there are an increasing number of staff-less stations that are an invitation to paper ticket fare evasion.

As Kenzy points out, JR East Suica and Tokyu led PASMO revolutionized transit in the Tokyo region to the point where legacy paper tickets are hardly used, over 90% of fares are Suica • PASMO, with the old style transit operator interchange paper tickets already eliminated. There are station entrance/exit areas that only accept transit IC. JR Kyushu on the other hand, and despite having their own card and system, have not done much with SUGOCA. It’s a me too transit card without innovation or marketing muscle. The usage area is limited but more than that, JR Kyushu offers almost zero incentive to use it over paper tickets. No JRE POINT or WESTER-like reward point retail/service platform effort to encourage SUGOCA use and sell services, no mobile roadmap.

It’s a huge wasted opportunity that, unfortunately, has resulted in an embarrassing fare evasion problem that won’t be solved by eliminating a few paper ticket fare options. JR Kyushu management, and certainly SMBC group stera transit, may think that open loop will fix the problems, but it will not fix them. A bolt-on thin client like stera transit needs an existing hardware base to work. JR Kyushu has to fix and enhance the SUGOCA infrastructure they already have first.

The new JR East Shinkansen eTicket service debuts March 14, but 30 day advance ticket reservations mean it kinda starts today. The best explanation, Japanese only at this point, is the Eki-net online guide that outlines the new reservation, purchase and seat assignment process for PC and smartphone web pages. I find the smartphone online version more streamlined than the PC one but they are straight forward if you are familiar with Eki-net. The basic Eki-net process is the same until step 7, the section where you assign the eTicket (s) to your registered transit IC card (s). The differences from smartEX are interesting:

You can register up to 6 different transit IC cards to a single Eki-net account: Suica, Mobile Suica, PASMO, Kitaca, ICOCA, TOICA, manaca, PiTaPa, nimoca, SUGOCA, Hayaken
A single Eki-net account can reserve/purchase up to 6 Shinkansen eTickets then assign tickets and seats to registered transit IC cards

JR East Shinkansen eTickets are geared for family travel in a way that smartEX, EX-Press and the old Mobile Suica Shinkansen eTickets ending March 13 are not. Other systems can only attach a single IC transit card per account. The flexibility opens up some interesting possibilities, since Apple Pay Suica is just another transit IC card, one person can buy and assign eTickets up to 6 difference Apple Pay Suica devices. The downside is that transit card linking is completely manual and up to the user to update information when a new card is issued or the Apple Pay Suica ID number changes (less common than before but still happens). There are bound to be some very short trips that end with a transit gate error. Some other observations:

eTickets require a Transit IC card (paper tickets can be issued in the event of a lost transit card)
eTicket reservations are currently limited to Eki-net online but Eki-net app will gain eTicket support when the service launches March 14
As Suica App is tied to Apple ID and the Mobile Suica cards registered to it, I don’t see Shinkansen eTickets being integrated back into Suica App anytime soon
I don’t see QR Code ticketing support coming until after the transit IC eTicket system is complete and necessary gate infrastructure in place, a few years down the road at best

Eki-net eTickets are limited to JR East operated Tohoku, Yamagata, Akita, Hokkaido, Joetsu, Hokuriku Shinkansen lines. The next obvious question is when will other ticketing be migrated to Transit IC, and what kind of discounts will be offered?

Discounts, incentives and ticket system silos
Most Japanese don’t buy express train or Shinkansen tickets at regular prices. The whole point of Eki-net, smartEx, and all the other account based ticketing systems are the discounts and incentives to get people out of the ticket office line and online. Each operator has their own complex set of discount schedules which they guard and control carefully because it is their business engine.

For this reason I am not optimistic we will see an all-in-one train ticket app. Sure, there is some integration of JR East eTicket and JR West e5489 because they share Hokuriku Shinkansen operations, and there might even be an app than integrates many different ticket systems, but I don’t see it offering all the discounts of stand alone apps like Eki-net, EX, Odekake-net, etc. I also don’t see multi-lingual support in the mix, at least not in time for Tokyo Olympics. The fun starts March 14 with many things still coming down the pipe, from next generation Suica to new transit gates. It will be an interesting time.