 vs NFC-A/B due to better performance should not be relying on things like Sony’s proprietary secure element chip, which is what push the cost high?
Toyota has publicly been heavily pro hydrogen fuel cell, but it’s not their entire bet. They are the leaders in solid state batteries for a reason.
It’s possible to do Felica without Sony chips. All compliant NFC hardware, even from NXP, ST, etc., supports NFC-F, even if they lack software support to handle Felica cards when sold outside of Japan. In particular, iPhones in the past couple years have Felica support through Apple’s own hardware. Felica is part of NFC (ISO 14443) as Type F, not RFID (ISO 18092) as it was rejected as Type C in favor of NXP (Type A) and Motorola (Type B).
You can get the secure elements from not Sony. Most smartphone secure elements support several standards, including NXP chips that support Felica and Sony chips that support MIFARE, and some manufacturers like Apple use completely in house designs.
MIFARE was traditionally cheaper than Felica, but not just because of Sony’s cut, but because Felica was a genuinely much better technology designed to meet the needs of high performance transit gates, rather than a cheap general purpose RFID card that works passably at best for transit.
I have also read that how Japanese tourism industry, other than focusing on overseas inbound tourist, domestically their focus are elderly who can pay, as they think younger people have less time and less money and isn’t worth the effort to market to. On the other hand, with the advent of LCC and easy online booking process, many young people have become backpackers and travel internationally to cheaper, and much more varied destinations across the continent and the world, and are no longer as keen to travel domestically.
Actually, it is the exact opposite of what you describe. Fewer young people are travelling (and studying) internationally, than say, the 1980s, and stick to domestic travel, with money saving options like LCCs and the extensive network of overnight buses. Group travel is just for the elderly (and has been for decades). Also, the proliferation of social media, and the sheer number of entertainment options available both in-home and locally, has made travel just one leisure choice among many. Travel has lost the cachet it had among the young in earlier times.
Yeah. Also its about time. A major problem for domestic tourism industry in Japan as that it has immensely high peak times (Golden Week, New Years, Obon etc) and long slack periods. And all the national holidays together still come below European annual holiday periods. The elderly of course have more time and a large number of them have pension pots.
Tourism industry has long campaigned to have longer and less concentrated holidays which has paid off with the growing number of national holidays. But isolated days off and a few long weekends aren’t going to encourage travel holidays as much as longer ones even though the Shinkansen’s speed and frequency helps immensely. Add in declining “hometown” feeling with generational turnover. And the time issue also discourages European styles second homes in the countryside which in turn would encourage repeat visits. Hmm, the LDP is willing to do so much for “regional revitalization” except stuff that might treat urban workers nicely. Good urban policy is good rural policy.
To find out why the travel demand is so peaky in Japan and why their government increased number of national holidays in recent years, you should fully assimilate to Japanese culture and mindset, work at one of the medium-sized Japanese company in Japan, and try to use your paid time off just for a day off. It’s impossible to use paid time off just to get a day off for nothing over there because of peer pressure from your co-workers. Until you replace all Japanese people with Europeans, they just keep working, and the travel demand remains very peaky.
Along with exclusivism and localism-nepotism, peer pressure is one of many reason why “regional revitalization” hasn’t been materialized over there. Except some regions, locals from rural areas aren’t open to a new things, changes, or people from other region. This makes very hard to retain teenagers to stick to the area or having someone migrating from cities or other regions, aka. “i-turn” because rural life is boring for younger generations, and outsiders wouldn’t be able to be accepted by locals typically.
Second home? No way over there. again, because of peer pressure as well as their philosophy. If you have a second home, you will be recognized as uber-rich, and it doesn’t make you look good. Random people in your neighborhood start some rumor about you, and your repetition could be harmed badly because people over there typically value ”清貧” more. One example of this is that small business owners choose not to buy a Lexus LS but buy the cheapest/lowest trim of Toyota Crown even if they can afford Lexus LS just to make them looks reasonable people; driving Lexus LS leaves a perception that the person is making too much money.
You should include non-holiday holiday periods like “obon” when you count number of days off Japanese workers can get in one year (though it won’t get up to European level).
The most telling thing is even when directly asked about costs nobody pointed out Spain, Turkey, South Korea. The US might – might – be interested in learning from Japan, but no other country was brought up.
My conclusion is proposing to build a hyperloop network centered on Minot ND, with connections to Dickinson, Devils Lake, Fort Peck Indian Reservation, and Brandon MB is the winner. North Dakota is a place where Diversity means German background as opposed to Scandinavian, so we can import a lot of black people to build it (at least 40% of all workers), demand all union, it is new technology, and it helps rural people – we even cut out the “big city” of Bismarck. A complete winner! (if you have been reading the comments here you will already know how @adirondacker12800 will respond to this) I wish I was sarcastic, but I truly believe that this is our best bet for getting HSR in the US through this committee without getting bogged down in politics – none of them are from ND so they will ignore NIMBY voices and the majority will find it hits something they care about.
When did this happen? I paid…some amount of attention to the 4.5 hour session and don’t remember any of the committee members asking about constructions costs, except in the sense that HSR might cost less than highways. I could have missed it though?
Bruce Westerman asked most directly. You was told it is different for different countries – but nobody mentioned how much different (and he didn’t press). He did get Brightline to give actual numbers for their lines.
I decided not to go on a rant about IBEW’s testimony. If this country was serious about corruption she would be in prison, convicted from her own testimony.
Bismarck is the second biggest metropolitan area in North Dakota. You’d want to cut out Fargo.
Didn’t the US managed to campaign NIMBY against Keystone XL pipeline successfully despite it didn’t really run in anyone’s backyard?
A trust fund model does have some advantages for maintenance, but I agree that it’s not the right model for funding construction of high speed rail.
For maintenance, what you want is a consistent funding stream that allows for things to be repaired and replaced on a regular cycle. In pavement, there has been plenty of research showing that the timing of maintenance is really important because degradation is not linear. So if resurfacing is deferred for too long, then you end up needing to replace the whole section of pavement which is orders of magnitude more expensive. Not all infrastructure has this dynamic, but some of it does so there is value in a trust fund that smooths out variations in revenue so you can continue maintenance spending during recessions. The highway trust fund originally worked this way, but now it’s an example of US government dysfunction and management by crisis. The main revenue stream (the gas tax) hasn’t been raised in ~30 years, so it isn’t enough to cover all the expenses and the highway trust fund now relies on regular top-ups from the general fund whenever it’s about to run out of money.
For big capital costs, I don’t see any issues with cyclical or lumpy funding streams. It’s fine to do this on a project-by-project basis whenever there’s money and political will available.
Flynn came from the aviation industry, not railroading. I don’t know who is doing his staff work but I do know that the marketing and service planning functions have had turnover and downsizing repeatedly over the past 50 years. About the time that a city or state planner gets a working relationship with someone in Washington, DC, the DC person is on their way out. This makes it hard to set up connections or tariff integration.
I can understand the desire for a steady funding source, having been through 180 degree project revisions when offices changed hands. However, we have the current environmental impact study industry and litigation as a result of highway planners having had few constraints. And there were political influences at work. I-5 in Portland was built on an alignment designed to create a wall between the mayor’s white, blue collar power base and the growing Black community in pre-open housing days.
Yeah, I wanted to say that Flynn is really combining the worst railroader