14 ms·

I've used JapanTaxi (mentioned in the article) a fair number of times, and while there's nothing wrong with the experience of the app, oftentimes the biggest co

I've used JapanTaxi (mentioned in the article) a fair number of times, and while there's nothing wrong with the experience of the app, oftentimes the biggest competitor to these ride-hailing apps is the fact that Tokyo's roads are so densely populated with taxis cruising everywhere that it's often faster to just hail one passing by than to open an app on your phone. I feel the Uber service itself has a sort of a 'premium' feeling around it in Japan, with the cars/staff/pricing being higher-class than the run-of-the-mill taxis you can hail. As such they don't seem to be used too often. I only use Uber/Lyft when traveling to the US; In Japan I come into contact with the brand much more often from the context of Uber Eats.

ginko 7y ago
> feel the Uber service itself has a sort of a 'premium' feeling around it in Japan, with the cars/staff/pricing being higher-class than the run-of-the-mill taxis you can hail. Isn't the average Japanese taxi some big Toyota Crown sedan already? How much more premium than that can you go?
- latch 7y ago
  I don't know anything about cars, but I'm pretty sure most taxis in Tokyo are the smaller variant, the Toyota Comfort. I'd describe them as comparable to most taxis (maybe cleaner than average + the automatic doors)
- citruspi 7y ago
  > Isn't the average Japanese taxi some big Toyota Crown sedan already? How much more premium than that can you go? Toyota Century :) https://www.wsj.com/articles/japans-new-emperor-picks-his-ridean-old-school-toyota-11556366401 https://www.wsj.com/articles/japans-new-emperor-picks-his-ri... Edit: Super short TL;DR from the article > Introduced in 1967, the Century isn’t for the flashy or hasty. Prospective customers can wait months because Toyota hand-builds each one. Background checks ensure the buyer is of an appropriate caliber, and not a member of an “antisocial organization”—a Japanese euphemism for the yakuza crime syndicates. It's only sold in Japan. Edit 2: Some more information courtesy of Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Century
  - roystonvassey 7y ago
    Wow. That’s a fine looking car.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    Are we sure that's the same car used for taxis?
    - kalleboo 7y ago
      He's answering the question "How much more premium than that can you go"
  - mlacks 7y ago
    It’s not the Century, it’s the Comfort. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Comfort https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Comfort The Century was designed for CEOs and heads of state, the Comfort was designed as a general purpose Taxi.
  - dmix 7y ago
    I love that quote about Yakuza. It’s so Japanese. Reminds me of mobsters in America driving Cadillac’s and how much that probably helped sales. I know my dad loved watching mob movies and bought a Cadillac in the 90s that was straight out of the movies. I’m curious if there was a badass motivation there similar to middle class suburbanites owning a Harley style motorcycle.
  - cattlefarmer 7y ago
    Those background checks don't seem to be working. Lots of 'yankees' running around in pimped up centuries. https://www.google.com/search?q=%E3%83%A4%E3%83%B3%E3%82%AD%E3%83%BC%E3%80%80%E3%82%BB%E3%83%B3%E3%83%81%E3%83%A5%E3%83%AA%E3%83%BC https://www.google.com/search?q=%E3%83%A4%E3%83%B3%E3%82%AD%...
- ekianjo 7y ago
  > some big Toyota Crown sedan already No, it's not that great nor that comfortable, but most of the time a Taxi ride is less than 10 minutes so it does not matter very much.
- NikolaNovak 7y ago
  >>How much more premium than that can you go? Hmmm; From my limited time in Japan / Tokyo, almost all the cars were Toyota Comforts [1]. I have not entered in a more basic and rudimentary vehicle in 25 years. I mean, it's _fine_. Whatever. Gets you from point A to point B. You get a feeling it'll likely do so reliably, and if not, virtually everything might be fixable with a hammer. But I wouldn't have called it premium... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Comfort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Comfort P.S. The "Automatic rear doors", at least in the versions I've been in, is basically a string/lever that goes from driver to the rear door. Again, it _works_, but when I hear "Japan" and "Automatic", my mind conjures a rather different picture. However, that was true of much of my personal experience in Japan - pragmatic and reliable automation, over fancy image. And cassette tapes everywhere... :P
CPLX 7y ago
I’ve only been in Tokyo once ten years ago but I remember the regular taxis there being staggeringly expensive. Are app based rides really more expensive than that?
- tfw5012 7y ago
  No, they're actually slightly more expensive than a regular taxi. The growth limiter for Uber in Japan is the strict regulation around transportation vehicles, partly due to the government's close ties with the taxi industry, and partly because I think the government wants to disincentivize car use in its bigger cities (this makes a lot of sense, since in Japan's large cities, public transportation is quite good). Because of this, any kind of commercial activity using a motorized vehicle is highly regulated - services like UberX are impossible to launch in Japan. Even for food delivery, delivery drivers all ride bicycles.
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    > the government wants to disincentivize car use in its bigger cities No need to do that, most people don't use cars to commute already - It's probably fair to say that car usage is only for the weekend shopping or driving out of the city - that's why car rental is a thing in Japan for a few years now, you don't need a car every single day of the week.
- CaptainZapp 7y ago
  I think a big part of what makes them expensive is the massive distances you may have to travel in Tokyo. Distances you often don't realise how large they are when using the awesome public transportation offerings. Price per kilometer & wait time seems higher in Zurich, for example.
  - smeyer 7y ago
    >Price per kilometer & wait time seems higher in Zurich, for example I think Zurich is just a particularly expensive example. At least in the US, most places seem a lot cheaper (I checked New York, Chicago, and San Francisco). Of the few cities I checked in Europe, London is comparable but Paris, Berlin, and Rome are closer to the US examples. Numbers come from numbeo such as https://www.numbeo.com/taxi-fare/in/Tokyo?displayCurrency=USD https://www.numbeo.com/taxi-fare/in/Tokyo?displayCurrency=US... and https://www.numbeo.com/taxi-fare/in/New-York https://www.numbeo.com/taxi-fare/in/New-York, just swap the city name for the other cities I mentioned.
fenomas 7y ago
> feel the Uber service itself has a sort of a 'premium' feeling around it in Japan I don't think it has any sort of feeling around it really - it's very small here and doesn't advertise, so I think you'd be fairly hard pressed to find someone off the street who's heard of it. (Unless they know it from Uber Eats that is, which does seem to be picking up steam.)
enz 7y ago
> I feel the Uber service itself has a sort of a 'premium' feeling around it in Japan, with the cars/staff/pricing being higher-class than the run-of-the-mill taxis you can hail. Even for a limo-class car, it's hard to beat the Toyota "JPN Taxi" model. Thoses high roof taxis are so fine! Besides, being able to pay with a Suica card is very convenient.
- franciscop 7y ago
  Love paying with a suica for taxi and basically anything, I've stopped taking any taxi that does not accept it and I'm considering changing my laundry place just because of this.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    American here. What makes "suica" a superior contactless payment method? EDIT: Thanks for the replies! Seems it's a more full featured version of Chicago's Ventra card.
    - magduf 7y ago
      Lots of places in Japan don't take Visa/Mastercard, so it's either Suica/Pasmo or cash. There's tons of vending machines, for instance, but they don't take credit cards, but a lot of them do take Suica. Suica is basically a debit card; you put money on it (there's terminals at all the subway stations) and then spend it on the subway/train fares and also at other places that accept it, like vending machines, taxis, and various establishments. The only thing I didn't like about Suica/Pasmo when I was in Japan was that, unlike a credit card, there doesn't seem to be a way to get a statement so you can see where you spent all your money. But I was only there for 2 weeks as a tourist, so maybe it's possible to get access to that and I just didn't find it.
      - Roujo 7y ago
        > The only thing I didn't like about Suica/Pasmo when I was in Japan was that, unlike a credit card, there doesn't seem to be a way to get a statement so you can see where you spent all your money I use Suikakeibo [0] for that. The latest 20-ish transactions seem to be stored on the card, so by scanning it using my phone every day I could keep a history of everything I used it for. You can even put in notes, since non-transit transaction don't list what you bought with it - just the amount. It makes for a nice reminder of my past trips. =) [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.mediavrog.ic_card_expensetracker https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.mediavrog....
hi5eyes 7y ago
>Uber service itself has a sort of a 'premium' feeling around therein lies their brand proposition >I come into contact with the brand much more often from the context of Uber Eats. ubers worth is their international recognition as a premium service
- untog 7y ago
  That's certainly how they started, bit if you get in an Uber in a random city (particularly one where drivers are not required to be licensed by the city) your experience has no guarantee of premium (unless you book UberBLACK of course, but that's a minority of trips)
- pmjordan 7y ago
  > ubers worth is their international recognition as a premium service Anecdotal perhaps, but that's not my impression among friends & family. (based in Central & Western Europe) Unless you consider "less likely to be totally ripped off" as "premium". Which I guess it is to some extent, but taxi drivers in many western countries have set the bar so extremely low in terms of service that competing services such as Uber just need to meet the bare minimum of expectations customers would have in other industries. In Japan meanwhile, as has been said by others, you literally get the white glove treatment in any run-of-the mill taxi and screwing people over totally goes against the grain of the local culture, so it's hard to see how other services might differentiate themselves. Plus of course, public transportation in the cities is fantastic and reasonably priced. (We recently did a trip to Japan with our then-9-month-old, which meant we had more luggage than we'd normally like. So we ended up taking a few taxis instead of dragging it all the few hundred metres from the train station to whatever next hotel/apartment we were staying; in Europe, many taxi drivers would probably not even have stopped to pick us up if they'd seen us with all our stuff.)
  - magduf 7y ago
    >taxi drivers in many western countries have set the bar so extremely low in terms of service >In Japan meanwhile... you literally get the white glove treatment in any run-of-the mill taxi and screwing people over totally goes against the grain of the local culture This is the stuff that the anti-Uber crowd just didn't seem to understand. Taxis in America will routinely screw you over and drive you in circles, knowing that you probably don't know any better, just to increase your fare, and the customer service level is abominable. Japan just isn't like this: screwing customers over is just something they don't do there, and having extremely high customer service with incredible levels of politeness is just the norm there, even in simple convenience stores. Uber got where it did in America because the taxi industry was absolutely horrible, so all it took was someone competing with them and not being as horrible and offering decent service to become wildly popular. The same situation never existed in Japan.
Brakenshire 7y ago
> oftentimes the biggest competitor to these ride-hailing apps is the fact that Tokyo's roads are so densely populated with taxis cruising everywhere that it's often faster to just hail one passing by than to open an app on your phone. Sounds like it could work well with rideshare to save money?
9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
In central Tokyo, hailing taxis is indeed easy, but out in the burbs it's a different story. The only way to get a cab at a relative's place -- and this is 15 min on foot from a major train station in Chiba, not bumfuck inaka -- is to call the local taxi company, preferably a day in advance. This being Japan, said company is super dependable, but they also only have like 3 cabs so if they can't come you're stuck.

ginko 7y ago

> feel the Uber service itself has a sort of a 'premium' feeling around it in Japan, with the cars/staff/pricing being higher-class than the run-of-the-mill taxis you can hail. Isn't the average Japanese taxi some big Toyota Crown sedan already? How much more premium than that can you go?

latch 7y ago
I don't know anything about cars, but I'm pretty sure most taxis in Tokyo are the smaller variant, the Toyota Comfort. I'd describe them as comparable to most taxis (maybe cleaner than average + the automatic doors)
citruspi 7y ago
> Isn't the average Japanese taxi some big Toyota Crown sedan already? How much more premium than that can you go? Toyota Century :) https://www.wsj.com/articles/japans-new-emperor-picks-his-ridean-old-school-toyota-11556366401 https://www.wsj.com/articles/japans-new-emperor-picks-his-ri... Edit: Super short TL;DR from the article > Introduced in 1967, the Century isn’t for the flashy or hasty. Prospective customers can wait months because Toyota hand-builds each one. Background checks ensure the buyer is of an appropriate caliber, and not a member of an “antisocial organization”—a Japanese euphemism for the yakuza crime syndicates. It's only sold in Japan. Edit 2: Some more information courtesy of Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Century
- roystonvassey 7y ago
  Wow. That’s a fine looking car.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  Are we sure that's the same car used for taxis?
  - kalleboo 7y ago
    He's answering the question "How much more premium than that can you go"
- mlacks 7y ago
  It’s not the Century, it’s the Comfort. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Comfort https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Comfort The Century was designed for CEOs and heads of state, the Comfort was designed as a general purpose Taxi.
- dmix 7y ago
  I love that quote about Yakuza. It’s so Japanese. Reminds me of mobsters in America driving Cadillac’s and how much that probably helped sales. I know my dad loved watching mob movies and bought a Cadillac in the 90s that was straight out of the movies. I’m curious if there was a badass motivation there similar to middle class suburbanites owning a Harley style motorcycle.
- cattlefarmer 7y ago
  Those background checks don't seem to be working. Lots of 'yankees' running around in pimped up centuries. https://www.google.com/search?q=%E3%83%A4%E3%83%B3%E3%82%AD%E3%83%BC%E3%80%80%E3%82%BB%E3%83%B3%E3%83%81%E3%83%A5%E3%83%AA%E3%83%BC https://www.google.com/search?q=%E3%83%A4%E3%83%B3%E3%82%AD%...
ekianjo 7y ago
> some big Toyota Crown sedan already No, it's not that great nor that comfortable, but most of the time a Taxi ride is less than 10 minutes so it does not matter very much.
NikolaNovak 7y ago
>>How much more premium than that can you go? Hmmm; From my limited time in Japan / Tokyo, almost all the cars were Toyota Comforts [1]. I have not entered in a more basic and rudimentary vehicle in 25 years. I mean, it's _fine_. Whatever. Gets you from point A to point B. You get a feeling it'll likely do so reliably, and if not, virtually everything might be fixable with a hammer. But I wouldn't have called it premium... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Comfort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Comfort P.S. The "Automatic rear doors", at least in the versions I've been in, is basically a string/lever that goes from driver to the rear door. Again, it _works_, but when I hear "Japan" and "Automatic", my mind conjures a rather different picture. However, that was true of much of my personal experience in Japan - pragmatic and reliable automation, over fancy image. And cassette tapes everywhere... :P

CPLX 7y ago

I’ve only been in Tokyo once ten years ago but I remember the regular taxis there being staggeringly expensive. Are app based rides really more expensive than that?

tfw5012 7y ago
No, they're actually slightly more expensive than a regular taxi. The growth limiter for Uber in Japan is the strict regulation around transportation vehicles, partly due to the government's close ties with the taxi industry, and partly because I think the government wants to disincentivize car use in its bigger cities (this makes a lot of sense, since in Japan's large cities, public transportation is quite good). Because of this, any kind of commercial activity using a motorized vehicle is highly regulated - services like UberX are impossible to launch in Japan. Even for food delivery, delivery drivers all ride bicycles.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  > the government wants to disincentivize car use in its bigger cities No need to do that, most people don't use cars to commute already - It's probably fair to say that car usage is only for the weekend shopping or driving out of the city - that's why car rental is a thing in Japan for a few years now, you don't need a car every single day of the week.
CaptainZapp 7y ago
I think a big part of what makes them expensive is the massive distances you may have to travel in Tokyo. Distances you often don't realise how large they are when using the awesome public transportation offerings. Price per kilometer & wait time seems higher in Zurich, for example.
- smeyer 7y ago
  >Price per kilometer & wait time seems higher in Zurich, for example I think Zurich is just a particularly expensive example. At least in the US, most places seem a lot cheaper (I checked New York, Chicago, and San Francisco). Of the few cities I checked in Europe, London is comparable but Paris, Berlin, and Rome are closer to the US examples. Numbers come from numbeo such as https://www.numbeo.com/taxi-fare/in/Tokyo?displayCurrency=USD https://www.numbeo.com/taxi-fare/in/Tokyo?displayCurrency=US... and https://www.numbeo.com/taxi-fare/in/New-York https://www.numbeo.com/taxi-fare/in/New-York, just swap the city name for the other cities I mentioned.

fenomas 7y ago

> feel the Uber service itself has a sort of a 'premium' feeling around it in Japan I don't think it has any sort of feeling around it really - it's very small here and doesn't advertise, so I think you'd be fairly hard pressed to find someone off the street who's heard of it. (Unless they know it from Uber Eats that is, which does seem to be picking up steam.)

enz 7y ago

> I feel the Uber service itself has a sort of a 'premium' feeling around it in Japan, with the cars/staff/pricing being higher-class than the run-of-the-mill taxis you can hail. Even for a limo-class car, it's hard to beat the Toyota "JPN Taxi" model. Thoses high roof taxis are so fine! Besides, being able to pay with a Suica card is very convenient.

franciscop 7y ago
Love paying with a suica for taxi and basically anything, I've stopped taking any taxi that does not accept it and I'm considering changing my laundry place just because of this.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  American here. What makes "suica" a superior contactless payment method? EDIT: Thanks for the replies! Seems it's a more full featured version of Chicago's Ventra card.
  - magduf 7y ago
    Lots of places in Japan don't take Visa/Mastercard, so it's either Suica/Pasmo or cash. There's tons of vending machines, for instance, but they don't take credit cards, but a lot of them do take Suica. Suica is basically a debit card; you put money on it (there's terminals at all the subway stations) and then spend it on the subway/train fares and also at other places that accept it, like vending machines, taxis, and various establishments. The only thing I didn't like about Suica/Pasmo when I was in Japan was that, unlike a credit card, there doesn't seem to be a way to get a statement so you can see where you spent all your money. But I was only there for 2 weeks as a tourist, so maybe it's possible to get access to that and I just didn't find it.
    - Roujo 7y ago
      > The only thing I didn't like about Suica/Pasmo when I was in Japan was that, unlike a credit card, there doesn't seem to be a way to get a statement so you can see where you spent all your money I use Suikakeibo [0] for that. The latest 20-ish transactions seem to be stored on the card, so by scanning it using my phone every day I could keep a history of everything I used it for. You can even put in notes, since non-transit transaction don't list what you bought with it - just the amount. It makes for a nice reminder of my past trips. =) [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.mediavrog.ic_card_expensetracker https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.mediavrog....

hi5eyes 7y ago

>Uber service itself has a sort of a 'premium' feeling around therein lies their brand proposition >I come into contact with the brand much more often from the context of Uber Eats. ubers worth is their international recognition as a premium service

untog 7y ago
That's certainly how they started, bit if you get in an Uber in a random city (particularly one where drivers are not required to be licensed by the city) your experience has no guarantee of premium (unless you book UberBLACK of course, but that's a minority of trips)
pmjordan 7y ago
> ubers worth is their international recognition as a premium service Anecdotal perhaps, but that's not my impression among friends & family. (based in Central & Western Europe) Unless you consider "less likely to be totally ripped off" as "premium". Which I guess it is to some extent, but taxi drivers in many western countries have set the bar so extremely low in terms of service that competing services such as Uber just need to meet the bare minimum of expectations customers would have in other industries. In Japan meanwhile, as has been said by others, you literally get the white glove treatment in any run-of-the mill taxi and screwing people over totally goes against the grain of the local culture, so it's hard to see how other services might differentiate themselves. Plus of course, public transportation in the cities is fantastic and reasonably priced. (We recently did a trip to Japan with our then-9-month-old, which meant we had more luggage than we'd normally like. So we ended up taking a few taxis instead of dragging it all the few hundred metres from the train station to whatever next hotel/apartment we were staying; in Europe, many taxi drivers would probably not even have stopped to pick us up if they'd seen us with all our stuff.)
- magduf 7y ago
  >taxi drivers in many western countries have set the bar so extremely low in terms of service >In Japan meanwhile... you literally get the white glove treatment in any run-of-the mill taxi and screwing people over totally goes against the grain of the local culture This is the stuff that the anti-Uber crowd just didn't seem to understand. Taxis in America will routinely screw you over and drive you in circles, knowing that you probably don't know any better, just to increase your fare, and the customer service level is abominable. Japan just isn't like this: screwing customers over is just something they don't do there, and having extremely high customer service with incredible levels of politeness is just the norm there, even in simple convenience stores. Uber got where it did in America because the taxi industry was absolutely horrible, so all it took was someone competing with them and not being as horrible and offering decent service to become wildly popular. The same situation never existed in Japan.

Brakenshire 7y ago

> oftentimes the biggest competitor to these ride-hailing apps is the fact that Tokyo's roads are so densely populated with taxis cruising everywhere that it's often faster to just hail one passing by than to open an app on your phone. Sounds like it could work well with rideshare to save money?

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago

In central Tokyo, hailing taxis is indeed easy, but out in the burbs it's a different story. The only way to get a cab at a relative's place -- and this is 15 min on foot from a major train station in Chiba, not bumfuck inaka -- is to call the local taxi company, preferably a day in advance. This being Japan, said company is super dependable, but they also only have like 3 cabs so if they can't come you're stuck.