PASMO
Easing the Congestions and Delays – Tokyo’s E-money System
Public transportation system is endemic to almost all major cities in the world, but Tokyo takes a large step ahead with an innovative solution. Just a year ago, a very 21st-century technology was implemented to Tokyo’s public transportation system for faster and smoother service. The service is a great application of the electronic money system for more than transportation service.
The system is not only a train pass, so it is named PASMO, a combination of “pass” and “more.” A PASMO card is available for a 500 yen (about $5) deposit, and the balance added on the card is automatically deducted for trains and buses. Since the PASMO card has smart card technology (or integrated circuit card) imbedded, users just hold the card by the top of the sensor at the train station gate (the card doesn’t have to be taken out of the wallet). This already makes the people flowing faster than before at the train station. Moreover, it eliminates time at the ticket machine, which would cause passengers to miss the train.
With the highly-engineered facilities and technologies, the train and bus systems take you in all the directions from central Tokyo. If you ask a direction to anybody, they would tell you to switch the train lines and sometimes between buses and trains. This is how people cruise around the city. Train connections are so common and it is taken for granted. And as Japan’s accuracy and punctuality-oriented society, trains and buses run by seconds. Most Tokyoites connect buses and trains just to go to work, so even a one minute delay on one train causes missing the connection, and that is a huge disturbance in Tokyo life. PASMO solved this problem and smooth ticket scanning system is the way to go.
PASMO is a unique way that the city introduced the electronic money system in the public sector, and it is still evolving into other sectors. The service is integrated to retail businesses such as kiosks, convenience stores, cafés and soda machines with the PASMO sticker on, and the balance is deducted from your PASMO card upon your purchase. When the balance goes below a certain amount a new balance is automatically transferred to PASMO from the connected bank account that the user submits when creating an account. PASMO is the perfect electronic money system for the majority of Tokyoites who commute, use convenience stores, grocery stores or stroll around a train station shopping mall for errands. It realizes total cash free work days between home and workplace.
However, PASMO is neither the only e-money system in Tokyo nor the very first. One of the mass transit systems, Japan Railways (JR), first introduced an electronic pass card system, and other railway companies had a pre-paid card system. Tokyo’s public transportation system is so complicated and multi-leveled, and the majority of commuters constantly make multiple connections within the spider-web-like transportation system. As a result, they ended up with multiple passes and prepaid cards for different train and bus lines, and there was a demand for one comprehensive ticketing system for the entire city, and that is how PASMO was invented.
Today, PASMO takes you to anywhere so smoothly that you wouldn’t need cash for routine errands. People move much faster at stations, bus stops and store checkout lines, all of which seem applicable to the New York metropolitan area as well. As debit card works on a street corner, PASMO is the innovative e-money system that takes coins out of people’s wallets in Tokyo.
——- Reported by Nori Akashi
Passengers just walk through the train ticket gate as holding the PASMO at the sensor on the train gate, because the sensor reads the PASMO even in the wallet. The ticketing process is faster than the train!
