As far as I can tell, for a teikiken between two stations, taking a much more convoluted route doesn’t add much incremental cost (e.g. for Iidabashi to Nihombashi, I can pay an extra 850 yen a month to get access to a bunch of extra stations, missing out only on Kudanshita and Takebashi https://i.imgur.com/y0fcd6j.png https://i.imgur.com/9FIqW5j.png)
Assuming I can craft a route that’s more useful to me and get the machine to sell it to me, are there any rules or norms that would prevent me from buying this pass, then taking the easy trip on the Tozai line for my daily commute and only using the convoluted path when I need to visit those stations?
I don’t want to break the rules or take advantage of something that’s not allowed, but if this is a standard practice, then it seems like it could be a very good value.
3 comments
Commuter pass has a spacific route. That mean, you CANNOT take the easy trip if you have a convoluted route. You need to take the convoluted route everytime.
That’s the rule. Whether they can enforce it, I don’t know.
Yeah so many people do this. A really common one is e.g. people who change at Ikebukuro or Ueno but work on the Shinagawa or Tokyo side taking the reverse loop of what they use on the Yamanote line since it nets them Shinjuku, Shibuya etc (and they can even take the Chuo line from Akihabara – a station not on their pass either – to get over there). Yeah it’s absolutely fine (maybe not ‘technically’ ok but nobody cares) and there’s no way they could ever know (the gates only check whether your starting/ending station are on your pass) unless you were arriving at a distinctly separate gate that is only for that line. Both your start and end stations Iidabashi and Nihonbashi have generic gates you can enter for all the lines so there is literally no way for them to know which train you took to get there without watching you on security or something (and no they do not track or care about timing of the trains).
You could even take e.g. the Tozai line straight from Nakano to Urayasu and it’ll automatically work out the fare minus the price of your little complicated Iidabashi to Nihonbashi pass route in the middle as if you had changed all those trains and charge you that amount.
This might not be a concern but your 労災保険 insurance doesn’t cover you for accidents not on the commuting route you registered with your company, I believe.
But yeah, it’s common to not stick to that actual route. In some cases, you can get a few extra stations on either or both ends because the cost is the same. As a made up example, a pass from鎌倉 to 新宿 could cost the same as the same pass to 代々木, but you get an extra station out of it.