Day 326 of writing every day.
The standard practice in Japan is to buy a commuter pass whether you’re a student or a worker who needs to take a bus or train to work every day. When I went to the training assignment, I didn’t get one though as there wasn’t a set end date and any obligation to see the project to the end. My company wasn’t getting paid to send people to help out on a project that was at the stage of prepping a prototype to see if a potential client is willing to pay money for it based on a hearing.
I ended up spending a month there though, and a commuter pass might have been a little cheaper for my company if they had me buy one instead of having me track the costs of a round trip ride every day I went in and have the total reimbursed at the end of the month at the same time I get paid.
Going back to the commuter pass… Cards with electronic chips to store money have been around for a while and I remember using one for the bus and light rail over a decade back in Minnesota when I was in college.
Japan’s railways and buses still have physical tickets and magnetic strip cards that can store a predetermined amount of money credit or that are valid for getting from station A to station B. But the most popular means of riding public transportation is with IC cards which can store money and allow you to board and get off the bus quickly, or get in and out of the gates of the train station. Basically every store accepts transactions made with these IC cards as well.
The cool thing about IC cards is that they support two and sometimes up to three commuter passes issued by different railway companies. I have to take JR West, Osaka Metro, and Osaka Monorail to get to the nearest station to my upcoming kitting assignment’s warehouse. I would’ve liked to have it all stored on one IC card, but that was not an option, so I purchased one for JR West on my old IC card, and got a second one with a 500 yen deposit to store the commuter pass for the Osaka Metro and Osaka Monorail legs of the commute.
The three-month pass costs between 70,000 and 80,000 yen simply because I have to change lines and not so much because it’s far away. It’s unfortunate that transportation is heavily biased towards moving people to and from busy areas with effective and fast lines, but getting from a city that’s mostly just a residential area to another that’s the same is the opposite. I’ll have to circle around to it by heading towards the busy city area and transfer to a different railway that has control of the trains in their direction.
Anyways, my company boss transferred funds for the commuter pass and I bought them today so that I’ll be ready to go on Monday.
Thanks for reading!
One Chance Works 