Japan has an interesting effort to integrate transit farecards across multiple metropolitan areas—so, a level up from the common case of having one card for all transit providers in a single metro area (which is already a hugely helpful step).
Their Nationwide Mutual Usage Service “allows riders of trains, buses, and other public transport to seamlessly use the same card in all major Japanese cities, across hundreds of public, privately owned, and third-sector systems.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_Mutual_Usage_Service)
As part of it, there are 10 farecards from around the country that are interoperable with each other. I almost cited it in this post, but it does seem to have a few shortcomings (or rather, opportunities for further improvement!):
1. "IC cards part of the Nationwide Mutual Usage Service typically cannot be used for continuous travel between two areas served by different IC cards, but rather within each area or city."
2. The unified logo doesn't appear to be in common use, at least judging from photos on Wikipedia. Rather, the letters "IC" will be shown in some form, but that form varies widely in appearance.
3. Each of the farecards still focuses on its own branding, with "IC" being quite secondary—whereas E-ZPass serves as *the* focal brand for its services.
Great post! Decentralization of this kind has tons of upside, political and operational among others. The voluntary participation aspect I think is particularly beneficial, ensuring solutions meet the needs on the ground and can be more easily adapted for various local contexts (while filtering out the ideas that end up not working well in practice). Seems to be better than the current top-down approach from the federal level for certain types of benefits, though not all.
The biggest and most obvious challenges that come to mind are related to financing, particularly when it comes to developing the initial infrastructure (who foots the bill for something early/experimental?). I'm sure there are models out there currently in use that could be adapted for this type of development, I'm just not familiar with them & applicability to public-benefit projects.
Yes, great point! I think the financing question really depends on the specific use case. For electronic tolling, I suspect that tolling agencies would have had pay to set up all that infrastructure anyway (e.g. the toll readers, IT infrastructure, call centers, PR campaigns) regardless of whether it's interoperable with other systems.
So if an agency is just moving to electronic toll collection at the same time as they're joining E-ZPass, I suspect they would be spending roughly the same amount of money, just that they'll get more value out of it due to interoperability. Which is great!
On the other hand, if a state already set up their electronic tolling system, then I imagine switching to E-ZPass could involve some transition costs, both in the infrastructure and in switching branding. How big, I'm not sure. But I imagine that's probably a contributor to why some other states haven't joined yet, as there are several other electronic tolling systems out there (e.g. California's FasTrak, Texas's TxTag).
Love this! Public transit fare cards immediately come to mind, although it may be moot with tap credit cards.
Good point!
Japan has an interesting effort to integrate transit farecards across multiple metropolitan areas—so, a level up from the common case of having one card for all transit providers in a single metro area (which is already a hugely helpful step).
Their Nationwide Mutual Usage Service “allows riders of trains, buses, and other public transport to seamlessly use the same card in all major Japanese cities, across hundreds of public, privately owned, and third-sector systems.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_Mutual_Usage_Service)
As part of it, there are 10 farecards from around the country that are interoperable with each other. I almost cited it in this post, but it does seem to have a few shortcomings (or rather, opportunities for further improvement!):
1. "IC cards part of the Nationwide Mutual Usage Service typically cannot be used for continuous travel between two areas served by different IC cards, but rather within each area or city."
2. The unified logo doesn't appear to be in common use, at least judging from photos on Wikipedia. Rather, the letters "IC" will be shown in some form, but that form varies widely in appearance.
3. Each of the farecards still focuses on its own branding, with "IC" being quite secondary—whereas E-ZPass serves as *the* focal brand for its services.
More info here: https://www.ejrcf.or.jp/jrtr/jrtr62/pdf/6-15_web.pdf
Great post! Decentralization of this kind has tons of upside, political and operational among others. The voluntary participation aspect I think is particularly beneficial, ensuring solutions meet the needs on the ground and can be more easily adapted for various local contexts (while filtering out the ideas that end up not working well in practice). Seems to be better than the current top-down approach from the federal level for certain types of benefits, though not all.
The biggest and most obvious challenges that come to mind are related to financing, particularly when it comes to developing the initial infrastructure (who foots the bill for something early/experimental?). I'm sure there are models out there currently in use that could be adapted for this type of development, I'm just not familiar with them & applicability to public-benefit projects.
Yes, great point! I think the financing question really depends on the specific use case. For electronic tolling, I suspect that tolling agencies would have had pay to set up all that infrastructure anyway (e.g. the toll readers, IT infrastructure, call centers, PR campaigns) regardless of whether it's interoperable with other systems.
So if an agency is just moving to electronic toll collection at the same time as they're joining E-ZPass, I suspect they would be spending roughly the same amount of money, just that they'll get more value out of it due to interoperability. Which is great!
On the other hand, if a state already set up their electronic tolling system, then I imagine switching to E-ZPass could involve some transition costs, both in the infrastructure and in switching branding. How big, I'm not sure. But I imagine that's probably a contributor to why some other states haven't joined yet, as there are several other electronic tolling systems out there (e.g. California's FasTrak, Texas's TxTag).