you open up JR East's NET de TEIKI site and pull up the route for your home station C to your work station H. you already know how much it costs because your employer calculated the amount for the shortest path between the two and reimbursed it to you as part of a transportation allowance.
but then, before ordering, you pause.
what if you just extended your commuter pass by a station or two, to reach station I, since you go there sometimes for leisure? how much would that cost?
it costs, to your amazement, 0 yen more, and the gears start turning.
you look up JR East's fare system, since commuter passes function (to the best of your knowledge) as a multiple of this base fare. you discover that train rides of 7-10 kilometers are 170 yen and train rides of 11-15 kilometers are 220 yen.
you consider that the route from station C to H is 10.5 kilometers long, and make a double-take at the table.
as it turns out, your train ride costs 220 yen.
you realize, excitedly, that you have a lot of Value to be accomplishing with your train pass. 4.4999999999 kilometers work of Value.
you think about how sometimes you like to hop over to station B for a mall and meal every now and then, and how station J is a large hub and would be very useful for all sorts of transit discounts. you extend your commuter pass from C<->H to B<->J for 0 yen more.
(hehehe, BJ)
(blackjack pays 3 to 2)
but then, disaster hits. you remember that half the time, you like to travel on train line 1, and half the time, you like to travel on train line 2.
this commuter pass gives you Incredible Value for the stations you like on train line 1, but is completely useless for the stations you like on train line 2. can you fix that?
you go back to the commuter pass calculation app. with a little tweaking, you convince it to, with a straight face, recommend two identically priced commuter passes to you:
-
take line 1 from B<->I like a reasonable person
-
take line 1 from B<->C, take line 3 from C<->F3 (one of your most important stops on line 2), then take line 4 from F3<->I, like someone who is allergic to being on a train for longer than 15 minutes
(note that of course that the gate at station H does not know what path you took to get there, so the change in route is purely for value-calculating purposes on the back end)
at this point you end up wondering the obvious run-on questions, like "is it really worth hacking together this commuter pass to get free transit between 75% of the places I like to go, but only if I force myself to take the JR and skip out on the metro [which I also use quite frequently for a different maze of travel], and also considering that commuter pass breakeven is at 15 round trips a month, and given that I am partially WFH, will I accomplish that much in a normal work month, I mean, wouldn't it be easier to just pocket the commuter pass money and just pay a la carte, but on the other hand, this is a chicken/egg problem where I am disincentivized to travel because it costs a token amount of money, and if it cost zero money, maybe I would just stop at station F, which I would otherwise never alight at, just for fun because it's free"
you think about how, given the high limit stated in your contract for commuter pass reimbursement, that if you moved to the far outskirts of tokyo at the correct angle away from work, your commute would be probably godawful, but on the other hand you'd be able to travel for 0 yen to pretty much anywhere interesting, and the real problem is that there are a bunch of fun spots in tokyo and none of them are really in the same direction right now for you
you lean back and look over to the granblue tab which you accidentally ignored for 30 minutes while diving down this hole of optimizations. the raid you've been autoing has been completed for maybe ten minutes or so now. you gotta click buttons for like fifteen seconds every 20 minutes for the rest of the day if you want slightly more materials to hoard. it's not a hard task but you gotta remember to do it. you click on your bookmark to restart the raid and resolve to think about trains tomorrow